The following review was conducted in July 2016.

Weƒ??re big fans of the most recent phones from Yealink. When we heard Yealink had a new conference phone, we were interested to see how the company would add innovation to a device that is notoriously resistant to redesign. The Yealink CP860 is the company’s first foray into the conference phone market.

The CP860 comes with Optima HD voice, full duplex technology, and 10-feet 360 degree sound pickup. Additionally, the phone offers extension microphones for wider voice reception, and 5-way conferencing. Yealink also added 320ms echo cancellation to the phone. Mobile phones and PCs can be connected for conference calls, and there is USB call recording support.

The Yealink CP860 sounds like an promising device, but does it live up to the hype? We took it for a test drive to find out.

First Impressions

The Yealink CP860 is a low profile phone. The buttons are very responsive, and they’re laid out in a utilitarian fashion. The small, sharp screen provides concise information, and the chassis is solidly built. The phone has a satisfying weight that ensures it won’t slide around on your desk.

The phone is only a few inches tall, but a bit wider than many conference phones. These dimensions give the CP860 a flattened look. The design differs from the standard form factors of most other Yealink phones. Despite the compact, pyramidal look, the CP860 finds a sweet spot between function and style. It appears professional and capable, and is instantly recognizable as a conference phone.

Features

The Yealink CP860 is a simple conference phone that allows you to register one SIP account only. This should suffice for most small and medium sized businesses, but if you require multiple SIP lines, this conference phone is not for you.

As far as standard features go, the CP860 has call forwarding, call waiting, auto answer, key as send, hot line, anonymous call, auto redial, DND, intercom, and history settings. The CP860 also has ringtone selection and upload capabilities, a local phone book with up to 1000 entries, multicast paging, and four context-sensitive softkeys. All of these features worked fine during our testing.

The Optima HD voice and full duplex technology of the CP860 made our voices sound mostly clear. The echo cancellation is effective. The phone comes with 360 degree sound pickup, which registered our voices wherever we were in the room.

The CP860 also offers 5-way conferencing calls. While some phones offer even more simultaneous conferencing capabilities, this should be more than enough for the average office.

Voice/Sound Quality

The sound quality for this device is good to fair. The audio speaker is robust in sound, but a bit tinny. We noticed that the highs were a bit too high, and people with deep timbres sounded a tad hollow. Aside from that, the sound quality was very crisp. The CP860 has a noise reduction algorithm that does cause some slow fade issues. The algorithm helps reduce ambient noise when no one is speaking, and its performance was mixed.

We had trouble hearing soft spoken co-workers sitting less than 6 inches from the device. We tried fidgeting with a few of the settings, but found that we werenƒ??t able to properly compensate for co-workers who had soft speaking voices. Meanwhile, louder individuals, perched about 10 feet away, were heard perfectly fine. This may be something worth considering if your organization has softspoken talkers.

Compatibility Testing

At OnSIP, we put each of the phones we use through a multi-step interoperability test in which we apply ~30 test cases. An example of a test case would be the following: