DualPhone 3088 Skype Phone, a few months on

A few months ago, I reviewed a skype phone that we purchased from Amazon, the DualPhone 3088.   I wanted to follow up after actually using it for a few months.  As a refresher, we bought this phone to reduce the number of minutes we spent on our cell phones.  It has both landline and skype phone capabilities, but we are not using it as a landline.

The pluses:

• costs are as low as expected.  We’re paying $13.52/month for phone service that can call normal phones anywhere in the world, and receive calls from any phone, on top of our internet service that we were already going to pay for.

The mehs:

• Overall phone costs haven’t gone down.  First we wanted to wait because of I had acquired a new phone and wanted to see how the data plan affected costs, then we looked at the next tier lower of cell phone plans and worried about minute overages.  We’re making an effort to use the home phone more now, and hopefully in the next month or two will cut our cellphone plan back.  (If we had a financial emergency, such a cell phone plan transition would happen much more quickly.)
• There is intermittant outages, but not worse than a cell phone (yes, I have at&t).

The minuses:

• the phone feels cheap–my SO refers to it as a ‘toy phone’
• You can definitely tell when someone else is using the internet–downloading a movie or large file affects phone conversations
• Every two to three weeks you have to re-register the phone with the base station.  This procedure varies in complexity–sometime it can be as simple as following a few steps (the user manual explains them [PDF]) but sometimes you have to sign into skype again.  The firmware hasn’t been updated since 2009, so I don’t expect this problem to ever be fixed.

In conclusion, I would not recommend this phone to anyone except an early adopter or someone trying to cut costs radically.