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There are times when reviewing toys can make tech reviewers question their sanity. This week has been such a time.

Three IP telephones were begging for a review. One was the IPEVO Free.2, a plain Skype handset that connects to the computer's USB port, with a complete dial pad on it, including a small window for menus and such. Next was a sexy analog telephone adapter from Vancouver-based Allo.com, which boasts its own worldwide private IP network. And finally, another Skype phone, the Philips VoIP841, uses both Skype and landlines.

I planed to try these three at different times of the day to see whether they would be derailed by bandwidth-shaping technology used by Internet service providers, which has been particularly hurtful to Skype.

Simple, no?

No.

Installing them nearly drove me to drink. I ended up thinking that the phones are either terrible (I believe the technical word is "suck") or there's something wrong with me.

At the moment, I'm leaning toward the latter. It's the way people react when confronted by Bolshie technology.

The IPEVO Free.2, a candy-bar-shaped device, is not very sexy, but promising — Skype is a simple technology, after all. But it came with nothing else. The manufacturer, in its haste to get the thing into the hands of reviewers, neglected to include a manual. Or software. In fact, it came in a plastic bag, like you get at the grocery store. I plugged it in, Windows XP recognized it, and installed some software. And so I downloaded Skype. And then I downloaded the IPEVO software.

In the absence of a manual, I had to wrestle with my computer, which had seemed to make a series of inexplicable decisions about whether I wanted to use the phone to call people or listen to MP3 files. Too much dithering later, I figured it out. The result? Marvellous. Excellent quality. I was happy and wanted to give it a rave review.

Emboldened, I grabbed the next phone, Allo.com's Analog Telephone Adapter. It came with just about everything I needed, except a manual. In its stead, I got a one-page letter from the manufacturer outlining four simple steps to get myself going.

No such luck. Hours later, the VoIP indicator light would still not go on.

Although Allo.com's offices are located in Vancouver, all its tech brains are in Bangalore, India. So I decided to ask them why the simple instructions weren't working.

I spoke to four Bangaloreans, all very pleasant, especially a delightful young lady who calls herself "Ashley" and a heroically helpful fellow named "Raymond," who tried to fix things for the better part of two hours.

The chat might have been shorter except that there was much discussion about two ports — the wide-area network and the local-area network, which the Bangaloreans insisted on calling by their acronyms, WAN and LAN. Now WAN is not something that falls easily off a tongue trained in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Tulu or Urdu; instead, it comes out VAN or FAN, and, spoken rapidly, results in the Ethernet cable being plugged into the wrong port.

"Raymond" ran into a brick wall, however, and couldn't help me further without checking with his superiors. But superiors, as we all know, work only in the daytime, which I call night when I'm talking to Bangalore. If I have a serious question, they can answer it only in the part of the day that I call night.

But guess what? While I spoke to Bangalore on my landline, they were using the Allo.com system there, and it worked fabulously. For them, that is.

My theory is that my problem has something to do with my firewall, or I have to open a port in my router, or I have to turn the antivirus off. I reluctantly tried disabling the firewall and the antivirus, with a singular lack of success, and had no idea how to configure a port for forwarding when I had no idea which port had to be forwarded.

"Raymond" promised to call me back in 24 hours, but I would be away in a conference all day. Who has time for superiors anyway, much less someone else's?

Finally, I turned to the Philips. This one was also rushed to the reviewer: No manual. No software. No cables. And, to top it off, no rectangle.

Philips, a company accustomed to communicating in many languages, has a series of drawings on the box describing the contents that are (usually) shipped inside, with no printed descriptions of the drawings. According to that legend, I was also supposed to get a rectangle.

I want my rectangle.

Assuming I could do without one, I tried the intuitive approach. I plugged things in, with no luck. After a while I ended up in a conference call to New York, with two nice heavyweights who, I was told, understood the product backwards.

After long consultation, they confessed they couldn't understand why my product wasn't going forward or backward.

I listened as they talked to each other about nailing IP addresses and how the different computers on my home network were all fighting over the assignment of addresses by the DHCP, but they came to no conclusion.

So they asked: Had I tried to install the unit in the correct order, as described in the absent manual? Ethernet first, the power second, then the telephone itself? Well, none of the possible permutations and combinations of the above would give the handset an IP address.

Finally, they decided it was the fault of the batteries in the handset. They needed to be charged a full 14 hours before I could do anything.

It was the signal all tech supporters give: This conversation was over.

By this time my deadline was hard on me, and I had … nothing. But I had done my due diligence, and no matter how much I talked to New York and Bangalore, we still have nothing more than a failure to communicate.

But could I have been wrong? Did I miss telling them something critical? I don't know. And that's why I question my sanity.