Product Review: Poly VVX 350
BY JASON HARRIS, REVIEWS EDITOR
Poly makes a wide array of telephony, communications and consumer electronic equipment. In time, we’ll take a look at a variety of VVX model desk phones, and today we highlight Poly’s VVX 350 — a business IP desk phone that’s aimed at small to medium-sized businesses.
Features and Overview
The Poly VVX 350 is a high quality, color, mid-range IP phone that can support up to six phone lines. If you require dependable and reliable connectivity and voice-call performance, the VVX balances cost-effectiveness and industry-leading productivity. Let’s peek at this model’s features:
- Sharp 3.5” display that offers information at a glance
- HD Voice support
- Group intercom paging — you can broadcast messages out to other Poly phones in your office
- 6 line key buttons — including a power keys service that enables you to manage up to 6 live calls at one time or monitor status of 4 other extensions
- Support for HD Voice codecs such as G.722, G722.1, G.729AB, G.711(a/u).
- Two (2) gigabit ethernet ports
Opening the Box
Poly’s packaging for the VVX 350 is no-frills, but that’s a good thing! I think it’s great the company uses easily recyclable materials. Upon opening the box, you’ll come across the expected phone base, handset, cord and ethernet cord. Depending on your model, the VVX 350 will include an AC Adapter. (Alternatively, this device is PoE capable, meaning all power is derived from the ethernet cord itself.)
Lastly, there’s an included plastic stand that enables you to customize the angle the phone sits on your desk. This phone model is easy to assemble and to connect to your network — it took me less than 75 seconds to get the phone physically ready to use.
Setup on SkySwitch
Once I had the VVX 350 out of the box and onto my workplace’s wired network, the phone booted up for its initial set up and I was ready to provision and use my fancy new review phone. Luckily, getting the new Poly handset online and ready to use was an easy three-step process:
- Find the MAC address using the Poly VVX 350s on-screen menus
- Add the phone to my PBX set up on Poly using the MAC address
- Use the Poly’s on-screen setup screen, setting the server type and address
Note: while some phones/devices can use their web page user interface to provision and set these preferences on the device, I read this Skyswitch Knowledge Base article and found that for Poly phones, you set this easy configuration up using the phone’s menus, not the Web UI. That said, phones ordered via the SkySwitch store are shipped already provisioned.
So, in my case, I simply navigated to the Admin settings, then Network Configuration, then Provisioning Server, changed the Server Type to HTTP and set the server address to http://sipcfg.io/cfg – then, the Poly VVX 350 power cycled itself and the phone came back ready to use!
Performance and Real-World Usage
I’ve had the VVX 350 on my desk for a week now and I’ve dialed landlines, my office-mates’ extensions and mobile numbers all over the world. The audio quality is reliably fantastic and the speakerphone quality is great. My callers report being able to hear me clearly when I’m on the speakerphone, even when I’m standing a few feet away. The VVX 350 proves to be a reliable workhorse that does its job without breaking the bank.