Update On The Magic Jack

I wrote a review of the MagicJack product last week when I had used it for only two days and about 4 hours of calls.  You can read my original Review of the Magic Jack here before continuing with this updated post.

This is a follow up to that post that now includes 8 days and about 40 solid hours talking on the Magic Jack for work related purposes.

I have used the Magic Jack for short phone calls < 15 minutes in length and for long conference calls that have exceeded 3 hours in length now.

Here are some more pro’s and con’s of the product, note that I can only speak from the United States, I don’t know if the Magic Jack is as beneficial in Europe.

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Magic Jack Pro’s

Voicemail

When someone calls you, you can choose to send them right to voicemail instead of answering and when anyone calls and leaves a voicemail, you immediately afterward get an email with a WAV file of that voice message that was left. It is so cool to be able to listen to voicemails on your computer and save them off, fast forward or skip through them with any audio editor…etc.

Caller ID

You automatically know every call that comes in, and if you have them mapped to your phone book, they can be identified by name.

Double Click Dialing

You can scroll through your call history and double click any number to instantly call that number.

Free Phone Calls & No Minutes

I now use 90% less minutes on my cell phone because I can do all of my calls over my Magic Jack to anywhere in the US and its included on the default price that equates to just over $3 per month, and if you buy all 5 years up front it makes the price just $1 per month. (Note: technology changes, and I won’t prepay more than one year at a time, who knows what will happen in five years).

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Magic Jack Con’s

Occasional Lag and Speech Stutter

If you Torrent, game or do heavy Internet surfing, you will get speech echoing, distortion and possible drops. You cannot have someone playing World of Warcraft or something while you are using the Magic Jack and for most people this will be the main reason not to get the product. You can surf the web, email, watch youtube video’s…etc.

The problem is less if you use a different computer for your Internet calls as most of the problems happen due to memory, disk lag or CPU resources having issues. If you have the Magic Jack on a different system it isn’t so bad and isn’t noticed as much.

Occasional Dropped Calls

Out of forty phone calls so far, two have dropped on me. Ironically it happened two times in the same call. This isn’t a huge issue and the dropping of calls is far less frequent than most cell phones.

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Summary

So that is my full list of pros and cons so far, if you work from home or make a ton of calls from your cell phone or long distance calls on your home phone, the magic jack is very much worth it and can save you a ton of money.

Do not get rid of a backup phone, it does not replace a cell phone or land line for emergency calls, but with the Magic Jack you probably can reduce your minute plan and save a lot of money on your cell phone bill.

Note, you can use USB microphone or regular land line. I have a wireless headset for my land line which works perfectly through the Magic Jack too, so I am not locked to my desk and can talk from anywhere in my 2 story house while on the Magic Jack.

-Dragon Blogger