Pros: The phone has a wonderful display, and everything my customers love about the SPA5xx line. They look good, sound good, and perform well.

I have two of these units specifically for the built in WiFi functionality. Semi portable phones where my wired network doesn't reach. I find this to be a more secure solution than to use the other phones with the cisco wifi dongle (which can easily be plugged into any other device). The phone also locks out it's PC LAN port when on WiFi so nobody can try to plug into that.

Cons: The provisioning interface (web gui), while adequate, looks absolutely nothing like the rest of the phone's series. It's OK, but different. I don't understand why you'd make a whole series of phones, then change that on ONE of them.

Using Ubiquity access points with "zero hand-off" enabled makes these phones not connect to the network at all. They'll scan, see the network, try to connect, and get stuck there.
The phones are also only wireless G devices. Not a huge problem, but as ubiquitous as N is getting, you'd thing a $300+ voip phone would have it.

Custom pictures on the display and the ability to play MP3s off a USB stick hardly make this worth the premium it commands.

Other Thoughts: Awesome phones that work great with Asterisk. I just wish they'd left some of the fluff off. If there were a SPA504G with the wifi functionality built in (not the dongle) then I'd go for that in a heartbeat.

Pros: It's a laptop. It does laptop things.
It came in a package that looks like a bunch of otter pops taped together. I could probably use that as a life raft.

Cons: The keyboard is the "French Canadian" one that is on ASUS' website. A little funky, but I will be able to figure it out.

The documentation (one whole sheet of paper) mentions that there is no recovery partition due to the refurb process (but there is one). The massive one sheet of paper also has underlined hyperlinks to how to make recovery disks (since the ASUS Software apparently isn't included with this WIN8 image). The actual web site is never mentioned, nor is the file this page came from included with the notebook.

The hard drive is horrendously slow (I suspect under 5400rpm) and bottlenecks the system horribly. Compared to my 5 year old Core2Duo HP laptop, this thing is still a snail. I am already looking into a better HDD or SSD.

Other Thoughts: If you're fine with a slow HDD, funky keyboard, and virtually ZERO documentation (because the documentation included is for win7 and not the installed WIN8) then this is great. Otherwise spend a little more and get a better notebook.