Review by iansltx 
UPDATED: 1.1 years ago
member for 2.7 years, 872 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Fredericksburg,Gillespie,TX
 $1 per month (60 month contract)
 about 4 days
 "Dirt cheap, cool features, decently reliable"
 "Uses computer, and only computer, as ATA, limited phone #'s, line quality...depends"
 "If you have a cell and you don't mind a probably non-local number, thish should be your landline"
| Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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9/23/08
Still works great. You hav to watch the call status window though. No budy signal on the Mac version at least. Makes for an odd feeling when you just tried to call a number and get nothing but dead air. Other than that, it's fine. No ports needed to be forwarded for it to work great, and call quality is very good on my connection. I'm just worried what'll happen when Comcast gets around to doing its QoS-bumping congestion measures. Might jitter things up enough to make calling impossible while downloading stuff when I actually do my calling.
8/31/08
A few minutes ago I got off a 18-minte call with my gram'pa in NC. Connection was as clear as ever, albeit with a slight buzz in the background due to I'm-not-sure-what. This seems to come and go and depend on the call. Otherwise, I've gotta say that the connection has held up great through what is now probably 300+ minutes of call time. Half a cent per minute, and counting...down...sounds good to me!
8/23/08
Service seems to be fine. Wish they woul dcome up with a new Mac client to allow for softphone use and incoming Caller ID but I'm not complaining. Several long calls went through without event over the past few days (maybe an hour or so of use). One call was clipped audio-wise but that might have been the other end. Overall very satisfied with the service...QoS is great with my router (WRT54G v8) and modem (Comcast S\A WebStar) with no port forwarding required. Though logging into the router UI and talking on the phone breaks up the connection, but that's more a function of a gimpy router than a bad phone system.
8/19/08
Got my Qwest modem in last night and Comcast in this morning (doing a side-by-side comparison). On both conections, the Magicjack service was solid though the Comcast-powered service might be just a tad better. I'll be reiewing both providers soon. At any rate, it looks as though, as long as you have a solid internet connection to route the call over, MJ will work great for you. Actually tried using it on a Suddenlink cable connection a week ago and that was fine too.
8/8/08
Late last week I ordered the MagicJack. Complete with an extra four years of service (25% discount...but you an get that after you have your 'Jack if you want...but I didn't know that). $40 for the device + 1 year, $60 for another four years. Not months, years. Hence my getting "real" VoIP; my cell provides a reliable connection and I have all the minutes I need but I just couldn't pass this up. The TAXES on my cell bill are more than a few months of service with MagicJack!
It takes a few days for the company to mail the 'jack out, but two days after they mail it I receive it. Not too shabby. I grab the USB ATA that is MagicJack, then head out to CircuitCity, where I get some cheap ($60 for a 3-phone set) Uniden DECT handsets. Back at the apartment, I fire up VMWare (I run a Mac) to download the necessary updates so I can run MJ natively on OS X. It takes several minutes, but finally I get to the signup screen for MJ. A few minutes later, after choosing a password and picking a phone number, I'm onlin and ready to call. Voice is shaky until I realize that I'm running VoIP from within a VM and switch to the OS X client, then things are pretty good.
By pretty good I mean the connection is either landline quality or there's something very wrong with it. Granted, this may be because my internet connection right now is a 5/896 Qwest DSL line that's shared wirelessly among seven apartments, but right now few people are in the building (mostly students) so I can't quite pin the problem down...yet. Problems include "stretched" voice or soft\no voice from my end, or an occasional click on the other end. But if any given call has neither of these defects, the call is good for its entire duration as long as I'm not taxing the internet connection (again, it's somewhat bandwidth-limited though the voice stream itself is only about 88k each way).
One cool feature is their voicemail system; I know this is sorta standard for VoIP but the VM system is quite advanced and will e-mail you any voicemails, complete with caller ID info and, of course, the VM itself as a wave file. Particularly useful for me since my cell has push e-mail...IOW I've got visual voicemail AND unlimited caling for practically nothing per month.
Cons? Again, line quality seems to vary. One call will be fine, the next one will be fine, the third one will be pretty good, the fourth will have something pretty darned wrong with it. However I can't pass judgment too much on the system as I haven't used it more than 100 minutes so far, so call quality may actually be fine a much larger fraction of the time than what I let on, and if it's provided with a suitable (preferably low-latency wired) connection ther should be a drop in connection anomalies.
Also, the USB Jack is the only ATA for the system; you MUST have a computer on with the Jack plugged into a USB port (any port will work thanks to the extensiion cable) at all times or you lose service. Oh, and the MagicJack app has to be running, which means not one but TWO dock icons and TWO desktop icons if you're on a Mac. :/ Hey, at least it works...pretty advanced little gadget if you ask me...
Last, phone number choice with MJ is worse than any ther VoIP provider I've seen. Okay, it could be worse, and it was when it started out, but Yahoo Voice has a better phone number selection than MagicJack, and both services cost very little. Though MagicJack wins hands-down versus Yahoo cost-wise and voice-quality-wise (Yahoo VoIP is rather lame in the voice quality department) and beggars can't be choosers. Besides, the darned things are so cheap that if someone complains about your number being long distance you just give them a MagicJack and their troubles are oer, assuming they have an internet connection solid enough to sustain the service (anyhing "on a good day" but satellite).
If you're wondering about the quality of service and such, PM me and I'll give you my phone number to call. It's pretty unbelievable how MJ is offering service for so cheap so I'd expect to see some skeptics ot there but it seems to work fine...
Followup comments:  zenz68
join:2008-07-02
Boynton Beach, FL | magicjack I am so positive about MagicJack that it pleases me to see someone knowledgable about computers writing about the fact that the problem might not be with your Jack but with your computer or the phone you choose to hook up to it. | |
|  | | 
Doris OSullivan
@verizon.net
| hearing on other end I have verizon, so they sent me the magicjack and I got my information a day before explaining what I needed to do.
I had my phone wired wrong, they only show you how to plug in your magicjack, anyway I got help and did it right, I was getting a lot of noise!
I called a friend that couldn't hear me, so back to the tech, He told me to go into the task manager and look for utses,newit setup, magicjack and loader, find one of them and delete it, so I did, (magicjack).Then he told me to do something, I can't recall, but it brought up microsoft outlook add-ins, I went looking for it and I came up on one and opened it, it told me not to get into it, that it
didn't work and made more of a problem than help, I lost the tech and my saved e-mail, with verizon you put your saved e-mail into a folder and you delete I guess anything like magicjack and you lose that folder and all other e-mail, even thought you put it in a folder.
So now I'm trying to find a way to get in touch with them, they don't give you any information on how to contact them except for accounting. Everything is done except no one can hardly hear me, it really upsets me because they don't give out information to contact them or a tech. If there is anyone out there that can help me I would really a happy camper. Doris | |
| | iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO | Re: hearing on other end I'd post in the MagicJack forum if I were you. I have't had that problem (300+ minutes of solid calls now) so I don't know how to answer... | |
| |
KBD
@bellsouth.net
| In searching for a way to call a real person at magicJack, I came across a site that had a lot of unhappy customers' complaints, and an e-mail address from one guy who said that sending this person a message would certainly get results. I did, and the next time I checked my messages (same day), a manager from mJ tech support had responded. I corresponded with him several times by e-mail, and we got our magicJack kinks resolved. His name was Richard, & his address was:
Rikard.Bone@ymaxcorp.com
I was well pleased with his help, and hope he can help you, as well.
KBD
Cowbabyhome@aol.com | |
|
rosa
@pldt.net
| It's no majic at all, Its for real! I'm a new user of MJ from the Philippines. I'm not sure if the product is safe and legal to use: Safe in the sense that when the time comes to pay the US 20 per year thru credit card, i wont be charged more than that after giving my credit card details. Now as to legal, whether i could use this to transact business with partners in the US.
As to satisfaction, I'm just wondering why some folks have difficulty getting the simple jack setup and go make those calls. A friend from the US sent me the unit and immediately upon receiving it, i just plugged it on my lap top and after a minute or 2 im ready. I tried to call friends in various states in the US and Cities in Canada and the sound is clear just like any normal phone. There are many people complaining about poor sound and connections there in the US, perhaps they just need to fix their computers first and their internet connections so they dont have to waste so much time conversing with representative of mj.
The system works as far as im concerned in this other side of the world so we just hope that MajicJack will stay forever and we appreciate the inventor and owner of majic jack; first for his talent for coming up with such a wonderful device and secondly for pricing it very reasonably for the good of everyone. So until someone comes up with a more advanced technology and still cheaper than Majic Jack, I think this product and the company behind it will be in the heart of people using the internet for a long long time. we wish you more successes and more power to your company! | |
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