Out of the box the phone worked like a charm. I was a little concerned after reading some of the reviews. However, the phone was very &quot;quiet&quot; (had to do some volume adjusts to get it to a normal level). The tweaking took some time because the manual is quite large and doesn't include everything that I needed to do. Such as: FREE TIP #1-To change your background screen: go to Menu-Tools-Settings-Phone-Standby mode and turn off the background image. Now you can turn it back on and tell it what image you want for your background.Other than that, I am a little disappointed that I have to manually go into the connections folder and keep activating the infrared when I want to use it. I guess this is a safety issue. My main point is.. this phone isn't exactly user friendly. However, after some work you can get it to work really well. It has some great options.. so I can deal with the horrible configuration.