A few weeks ago, I succumbed to a whim and bought me one of them Magicjacks. This is a little device that you plug into the USB port of any PC that has an Internet connection of decent speed. You can then plug a telephone into your Magicjack and use it to make phone calls anywhere you like…or folks can call you on your new Magicjack phone number. I promised a review here and this is it.
How does it work? Decently. Sound quality is not quite as good as my conventional phones (which are digital) but it's quite acceptable. The first few times I used it, I had a couple of abrupt, inexplicable disconnects but that hasn't happened since.
How is it for price? Pretty good. The Magicjack device costs twenty bucks and then it's twenty bucks a year for the subscription…less if you buy multiple years at one time.
Are you going to keep using it? I don't think so. I can imagine situations where it would come in handy but they don't really apply to me. You have to have your computer on to use the Magicjack and you have to be at that computer. So if you have a home with multiple lines and/or phones in different rooms (both apply to me), you're not going to get rid of that. I suppose you could convert all your existing phones to the basic, cheapest service plan and then make all your toll and long distance calls from the Magicjack but that sounds like a lot of trouble.
Where it might come in handy is for travel: No matter where you go, you can take your phone number with you and make calls. That's assuming you get a fast Internet connection wherever you are…but again, you have to have your computer on to have the phone working. (If a call come in when your computer is off, the Magicjack system takes a voice mail message and e-mails it to you as a WAV file.)
I can imagine situations where this might come in handy. If I was commuting to an office or another city, it might be beneficial to forward all my regular incoming calls to my Magicjack number and then carry that number with me. It could also make it a lot cheaper to make calls on the road — a substantial savings if I went overseas, which I never do. But none of these scenarios applies at the moment.
The thing is probably ideal if you're living in one room with a good Internet connection and money is tight, and you might appreciate one if you travel a lot. But I'm not finding a whole lot of use for mine right now. And that's my report on the Magicjack.