Dec 13, 2007
A new telephone device for travel may possibly be more useful (gulp!) than Skype!
Skype (www.skype.com) is an excellent piece of software that allows for free phone calls made through your computer. It's free to download. However, calls are only free if your recipient is also on Skype; if you want to call a regular phone, the fees start kicking in.
So now there's a new gadget called MagicJack. Basically, MagicJack (www.magicjack.com), which is smaller than a deck of playing cards, turns your computer or laptop into a phone jack. It's a small unit that you insert into one of your USB ports. You can then plug a regular phone into that and start dialing. For a $40 fee for a year ($20 for each additional year that you wish to subscribe), you get this phone jack and the right to make free calls in the US and Canada, plus free international calls back to the US and Canada. It doesn't use your standard phone line; you just have to be connected to high-speed Internet for it to work. MagicJack also comes with voicemail and an American phone number through which you can receive free phone calls (Skype makes you pay extra for those things).
A few other companies have introduced similar products (Vonage's V-Phone is one of them), but those have come with the requirement to not only purchase the device, but also to pay a monthly subscription fee starting around $15. That makes MagicJack, with its once-annual fee of $40, period, the better deal. It also comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, which few new electronic inventions do, so you can send it back if it doesn't work.
I haven't used MagicJack myself yet, and so I can't vouch for it yet. It seems to me that not all hotel phones have jacks that are the same size as the phones we use at home, so a user of MagicJack might need to also pack a lightweight phone handset or earpiece for use on the road. Also, all new electronics gadgets go through a period during which their kinks are worked out. Still, $40 a year for a device that provides unlimited calls on the road as well as back at home seems like a very good deal to me. Are there any readers of this blog who have experimented with MagicJack and would like to share a report?
Write and read comments about this post.
So now there's a new gadget called MagicJack. Basically, MagicJack (www.magicjack.com), which is smaller than a deck of playing cards, turns your computer or laptop into a phone jack. It's a small unit that you insert into one of your USB ports. You can then plug a regular phone into that and start dialing. For a $40 fee for a year ($20 for each additional year that you wish to subscribe), you get this phone jack and the right to make free calls in the US and Canada, plus free international calls back to the US and Canada. It doesn't use your standard phone line; you just have to be connected to high-speed Internet for it to work. MagicJack also comes with voicemail and an American phone number through which you can receive free phone calls (Skype makes you pay extra for those things).
A few other companies have introduced similar products (Vonage's V-Phone is one of them), but those have come with the requirement to not only purchase the device, but also to pay a monthly subscription fee starting around $15. That makes MagicJack, with its once-annual fee of $40, period, the better deal. It also comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, which few new electronic inventions do, so you can send it back if it doesn't work.
I haven't used MagicJack myself yet, and so I can't vouch for it yet. It seems to me that not all hotel phones have jacks that are the same size as the phones we use at home, so a user of MagicJack might need to also pack a lightweight phone handset or earpiece for use on the road. Also, all new electronics gadgets go through a period during which their kinks are worked out. Still, $40 a year for a device that provides unlimited calls on the road as well as back at home seems like a very good deal to me. Are there any readers of this blog who have experimented with MagicJack and would like to share a report?
Write and read comments about this post.
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