Notes on the Aastra 57i IP phone
Just by looking at the phone all I can commnet is that the Aastra 57i is a nice executive looking Ip phone featuring a large display and popular black and silver colors. 
However, it takes much more than just looking to really get to know and appreciate a product, below you can find my comments after a deeper observation and testing.
It runs a highly advanced firmware now several years matured mostly inherited from the Aastra 4xx IP phones product line. The Nortel like physical appearance of the 4xx models was completely redesigned. I personally like it better and find the new keys distribution easier to use but that is my personal subjective opinion.
Like other popular, mature, open standards, high end SIP phones in the market such us Cisco, Polycom, Snom, the Aastra currently support a myriad of features like multiple lines, transfers, conference, BLF, DND, distinctive ringing, call log, directory, POE, etc. More advanced capabilities is what interest me the most. For a complete list of features take a look at the datasheet here: datasheet
The phone, that can be configured with up to nine different SIP accounts/lines, is rich in features as you can find out from the datasheet. After using it for a few days I can tell that the audio quality is very good and perform flawlessly but what really sets a good IP phone apart nowadays is usability, flexibility and how easy is to maintain and configure it, aspects in which the 57i excels.
It offers great deal of features and flexibility for configuring it and integrating with external applications thru the embedded XML browser and action URI events. That allows the phone exchanging regular http messages with an application server. Many cool and productivity boosting applications can be developed. The autoprovisioing capabilities are advanced and can be combined with XML applications, no need to wait 3 minutes for the phone to boot for a configuration change. For example the phone can be completely reconfigured on the fly with a press of a button so you don’t need to rely on the Ip-pbx for hot-desking. I’m not getting into details of XML but if want to learn more and develop some applications Click Here for a nice document on that.
Since many resellers don’t want to get into programming but still want to impress the end users, ABP Tech hosts an XML application server which is running more than 10 useful applications ready to be used for free. Some applications available that bring current information to the phone’s display are: area code lookup, reverse phone directory, weather, CNN news and a stock price lookup for a given ticker.
The backlit 144×128 pixels LCD display is probably the largest among all IP phones in the market however most of it is reserved for labeling the configurable and context soft keys. The softkeys can be configured in a number of ways, they are electronically labeled that means the LCD display puts the label according to the context. An interesting feature is what I call virtual softkeys in which you have multiple pages mapping different functions for each group of keys so you can navigate between the pages and have a total of 30 virtual buttons configured but only 12 physical buttons. Each virtual button can be configured as Line, speeddial, DND, BLF, XML, Park, Pickup, etc (see picture for complete list).
The Aastra 57i supports and extended keypad. I tested the 360M module with same virtual buttons technology. 
The extended keypad is powered and automatically recognized by the handset and comes with 20 buttons that can hold up to 60 virtual buttons without taking half or my desk. The other option is the 536M that does not have the display for dynamically labeling the virtual buttons but has 36 physical buttons with configurable but fixed functions that are manually paper labeled.
If there is a complex attendant console in which more buttons are needed, we are lucky because you can daisy chain up to three of the keypads
Finally, I want to mention the 57i CT, it is another flavor of the 57i that has everything and one additional feature: it acts as a wireless DECT base station and can support up to four wireless DECT handsets.
Henry
