Let’s face it, the landline is dying. We all have cellphones, and every day fewer people feel the need to pay for a landline phone that no one ever calls them on anyway. Unfortunately, cell phone reception indoors isn’t always the best. Besides, wandering around your house talking on your cellphone seems like a waste of perfectly good battery life, when you could just as easily leave the phone charging and talk on a land-line.
Cobra PhoneLynx brings a creative solution to the table. This convenient little device connects your cellphone to an old landline phone via a simple Bluetooth connection. The cellphone treats PhoneLynx like any other bluetooth headset: a call comes in, the land-line rings. Dial on the land-line and your cellphone will make a call. You even get caller ID if your landline handset supports the option.
With PhoneLynx hooked up, you can leave your cellphone plugged in and charging wherever the reception in your home is the best. Connect it to a cordless phone and you can take it anywhere in your house without a problem. I tested PhoneLynx with a cordless system that hooks one base station with four handsets, and it gave me a phone in every room, just like the old days. 
Forgetting your cellphone in the other room no longer creates a mad dash when it starts to ring.
Call quality was decent. Cobra’s ClearCall technology supposedly cleans up the signal for clearer calls, but I didn’t see much difference between PhoneLynx and a decent bluetooth headset. That means the call quality isn’t quite as good as a traditional landline, but if you’ve already gone all-cell phone, your calls sound about as good as you’re used to.
PhoneLynx also has the option of connecting a second phone at the same time, so a household with two cell phones can work off of one PhoneLynx and one set of landline phones. There’s no option for a third phone, but presumably most households with three or more cell phones consist of two parents who remember and want the advantages of landlines, and kids who’d rather have the privacy of a totally separate cellphone. I don’t expect the two-phone limit to be an issue for many users, but keep in mind your own needs before you buy.
PhoneLynx does come with a few small limitations. The first is distance. The bluetooth connection is pretty solid, but don’t wander around your house with your phone if you really want to take advantage of it, because bluetooth can only handle about 30 feet of separation even under ideal conditions. I’m not sure smartphone users in particular will find PhoneLynx a good fit, since they won’t be making much use of all their phones’ other capabilities if their smartphones are sitting by a windows somewhere waiting for a call.
Make sure you have plenty of minutes in your cell phone plan. If you give up a traditional landline setup in favor of PhoneLynx, remember that you’ll use your cellphone for every call, even when you’re holding a home phone handset in your hand.
PhoneLynx can also get a bit complicated if you use it for two cell phones simultaneously. There’s no mechanism for it to handle your calls like a two-line land-line setup. If you are on a call with one PhoneLynx cellphone, your other cellphone is effectively cut off from your phone system.
The last hurdle is price. PhoneLynx is far cheaper than some other options for improving your home cell reception, but $59.95 seems a bit steep for a device with such a limited use case. Personally, I’ll stick with a decent bluetooth headset, but then I gave up landlines years ago. If you’re looking for a way to travel back in time to the landline era, PhoneLynx is a solid option.
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