Design Flaw With SPA-50X Phones

[David Trad]

Hi Cisco Team,

I have been monitoring the most complaints coming in about the SPA-500 phones over the installs that have happened over the last 4 months, and the one that is toping the chart right now, and the only one that has only one practical work around which costs money to do it, and would like to bring it the development teams attention, maybe in the hope that this can be resolved with a firmware upgrade??

If we install either a 508G or a 509G at any site, the first thing they say next day is... How are we supposed to know which button to press to dial an extension when we are on a call?...

The worst thing about this is I do not have a simple answer, other than install a SPA-500S module to counter the issue, but I think we can all agree this is not a cost effective solution or the best practice one.

Can Cisco look at the potential of allowing the font size to be decreased with the overlap screen and also make that overlap screen transparent? This was an issue that also hit the 7900 series phones until FW 8.3 or 8.4 I think, and you made that overlay transparent and BINGO!!! the problem went away... We now have this issue with the Gray Scale SPA 50X phones and it really does need to be resolved, think about it, if you cannot see the buttons how is one supposed to know which button to press to speed-dial or do a one_button_transfer if they don't know who resides on that button? Do we have to tell them to memorize each one?? Try it out for yourself and see what I am talking about, it is frustrating the hell out of customers.

And if you scale the font size down it will also stop the cutting of the names, if the client wants the larger size fonts then we can at least explain to them the trade offs with increasing their size.

Please have your Dev teams look at this, whilst not a bug as such, it is still a pretty important issue that does need to be looked at... I am sure I am not the only one that has received this complaint, If I am I will be totaly shocked.

Cheers,

David.

[danplacek]

I get asked this ALL THE TIME. Especially when doing initial training... I'm demonstrating a transfer or something using one of the buttons and... "how do you know which button to press?". It seems silly too because the "banner" that covers the whole screen is like 80% whitespace anyway.

[David Trad]

Just today Daniel I have had to field three calls on this, and you feel like you have let the client down because it is such a stupid issue to have...

The problem I have is that I cannot continue to keep pushing the clients to purchase 500S modules to counter the problem, they are just not buying it anymore.

Anyway I did my job and brought it to the attention of Cisco (I Hope) and maybe through others also putting up their hand about this problem, they may take it with serious consideration.

Cheers,

David.

[bill.roland]

When we had SPA508G's I got asked about this constantly as well. I do hope the folks at Cisco come up with some sort of workaround.

[nalbert]

Thanks for brining this up on the support community. I will forward your comments to the Product Manager for review.

[David Trad]

THANK YOU Albert!!!

It is important that Cisco acknowledge this issue, we all need to collectively work to keep Cisco an easy to use system, difficulties like this is enough to turn a customer off simply because it is such a small annoyance.

My gratitude for ackowladging the problem.

Cheers,

David.

[nalbert]

Thanks David. Patrick Born from the phone team suggested that Up down arrows can be used here to move the display.

• Eg. When I am on a call and I would like to see my display without the call descritption, then all I need to do is use the down arrow. This will clear out the display and I will be able to use other buttons. 
• If I have to toggle between multiple calls, then I can use the Updown arrows to toggle mutiple calls.

Have you guys tried this?

[David Trad]

Hi Albert,

AWESOME Response time!!

This is a good work around, but please keep in mind that the problem is still there though, whilst this may help out in training the clients to do this (And I will test this to verify it is a workable solution) ultimately they need to consider a *Fix* for it, you can only change peoples habits to a certain point, until they realize they have to do to much to achieve a simple result.

I hope you understand that

Cheers,

David.