OPEN BOX - Polycom RealPresence Trio 8800 IP Conference Phone - Replaces Polycom IP7000

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Love all the wireless connectivity features of this phone. Wifi let's me preconfigure the phone and any of the staff that has a meeting scheduled can just get the phone, plug it into the wall and use it. Have had some users also use the bluetooth connection off of it for various online video calls.

This conference phone has excellent sound pickup, ambient noise cancelation, and a fantastic speaker. It looks slick and very professional and modern. In order to take full advantage of its functionality, you need Skype for business (not teams) and nobody uses that anymore. So this ended up being an excellent conference phone for us, but we aren’t using any of the extended features. If I were to buy something like this again, I would go for an MS Teams edition and possibly a full teleconferencing solution with video.

We have hundreds of these deployed in Zoom Rooms to handle the audio and controller functions. Much more robust than using an iPad controller (that inevitably gets unplugged and then discharged, thus taking the Zoom Room offline), and much better audio than any TV-mounted solution like a Neat Bar or Logitech Rally.

I had a difficult time getting these to work. I spent about 2 hours on the phone with a local VOIP vendor. I’m very good with technology but I don’t think I could have set these up by myself and I wasn’t able to get any free support directly from Polycom. The first thing you want to do when you get the phone is upgrade the firmware. This helps solve a lot of problems and provides extra features. The USB feature allows you to connect the phone directly to a computer and use it in a Zoom meeting as if the phone is just a standalone microphone and speaker. Zoom supports muting from the phone and vice versa. We often have several all-day calls going so this approach saves money. The Bluetooth also works but the integration was lacking compared to the USB connection. Features like muting didn’t work correctly with the Bluetooth. The phone can also be configured as a Zoom room controller but I passed on this approach because I was concerned about complexity and reliability. The sound quality is very good and the mics don’t pick up any feedback from the speaker. You can get 2 external microphones with mute buttons which work well for a big room or a long table where you want everyone to be able to mute. The cords for the external mics were too short and proprietary. You can buy expensive longer ones. The screen is responsive and you don’t have to wait much when using the interface. One problem with the touch screens is that several times we’ve had employees move the phone during a call and accidently hang up because of the way they picked up the phone. We never had this problem with our older buttoned Polycom phones. The phones are not fully functional when used with a standard POE switch and the phones will always display an error message when connected to such a POE switch. I had to purchase the expensive Polycom POE injector kits to get rid of the message and get full functionality. Our old Polycom SoundStation Duo lasted about 8 years before the audio quality degraded. Hopefully these will last as long.