Teams edition phones have been available for a few weeks now so lets take a look and see what they are all about. At the time of writing Yealink has the only two Teams edition phones that are generally available, however Audio Codes and Crestron have announced devices that should be available in the near future and I hope to review those soon.
Lets start with the 7 inch touch screen featured on both models, at 1024×600 resolution it is crisp, the text is easy to read, and it has plenty of brightness for a well lit office environment, however the glossy screen is a little more reflective than I would prefer it to be.
One of the advantages of the T58a is that the display is tilt adjustable unlike the T56a. The adjustable display is a big help in mitigating reflections by allowing you to tilt it to a position that doesn’t reflect the light. Here you can see how far you can tilt the display on the T58a in comparison to the T56a.
T58a Tilted Back VS T56a 
T58a Tilted Front VS T56a
One of the things I really like about these phones is the USB port on the back that supports a USB headset. This isn’t something I have seen on many other desk phones and I think it’s a really nice feature to have. I tested it with a Plantronics Blackwire headset and I even plugged in the BT600 Bluetooth dongle for my Plantronics Focus UC headset and everything worked including all the call controls, answer / hangup, volume, mute, etc. I also tested the Bluetooth support by pairing my Focus uc directly to the phones built in Bluetooth and once again everything worked as expected.
There aren’t a lot of differences, so here is a quick list of features the T58a has that the T56a is missing.
- Adjustable Display
- 2 USB ports vs 1
- WiFi
- USB Camera support*
*to be enabled with future firmware updates.
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