The approval of the V.90 transmission standard, which unified the two competing 56 kbps standards last year, has led to a flood of new modems.
Hayes apparently is not too concerned about differentiating its new Accura V.90 56K Speakerphone modem from the pack. Indeed, it is a bland product, unless you have the tacky silver-and-red 20th-anniversary model.
The installation could be easier. One is presented with the modem, multiple manuals, multiple floppy disks, and a CD-Rom. There is no serial cable to connect the modem to the computer. A leaflet in the box says users must install the floppy disk version if they have both the CD and floppies.
I tried this and found various problems, such as a missing runtime file which prevented me from running the 'Quick Start' help disk. Also, the telephony application, Phonegraphic 2.0, may be the ugliest program ever, and caused hard hangs on my PC.
Fortunately, the CD-Rom installed properly, and also has Communicator 4.03 and a Chinese (GB-characters) modem monitoring program. The vastly superior Hayes Smartcom Message Centre takes Phonegraphic's place. It worked well, although the interface could be better and there seems to be no way to uninstall it.
Over several nights, I tested the Hayes and compared it to an E-Tech V.90 modem. Between 11pm and 4am, I dialled into the V.90 modems of two Internet service providers, Asia Online and Hongkong Supernet, using the same data phone line and Practical Peripherals Accelerated COM port.