MagicJack ... It Does Work

Primarily out of a desire to save daytime (7am - 5pm, M-F) cell minutes while not having a landline, I decided to give MagicJack's VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) system a try. Basically, it's pretty much a no-brainer to at least try since it's only $40 for the first year of service (and $20 per year after that). This writeup is going to be my documentation of the high's and low's of installing and using MagicJack (MJ) over the first few days. I'll update it later with comments about my ongoing experience regarding its long term functioning and viability.

First, the ordering process. I ordered from the online store late in the evening of March 14, 2010, using a PC running WinXP with Google's Chrome browser. At the time I decided to order I'd already spent about 1.5 hours reading comments on MJ from various forums as well as familiarizing myself with how it worked via the FAQ sections on its web pages. At any rate, I decided to order (with a credit card) and got to the very end of the process when some additional, final question (I don't even remember what it was) popped into my head and I left the order page right at the point of "last click". However, I hadn't closed the page because I didn't want to go through the entire ordering process again. I just clicked over to another tab that had the FAQ section on it and read through to find the answer to that one last question. This took me about 10 minutes. Imagine my surprise when I returned to the order page to see a "Thank you" for my order. I absolutely never clicked that last required link so I know it timed out or something and entered the order as if I *had* actually done so. Fortunately, by the way, it did use the cheapest shipping option. This "auto timeout order click" thing was disturbing, but since that final question was answered correctly (for me) and I really was going to order anyway, I let it go. Again, that should definitely *not* happen ... you really should have to make an actual positive click to finish placing an order. I wonder if anyone else out there has had a similar experience?

The MJ arrived in snail mail on Saturday, March 20 and I immediately started the installation process on my iMac. This was about 2:30pm and thus began a 7 hour odyssey with MJ's chat support technicians. While the system mounted properly after being plugged in, and I could start the MJ program running, the registration procedure was not clear at all. I finally ended up dbl-clicking the upper center magicJack icon area but it simply was not (apparently) able to properly startup my account. I did have a phone number assigned but the top line of the soft dial pad showed a phone number of 000-000-0000 instead of the correct number. By now, if you've read about this type of thing from other customers' adventure tales, you know that I was chatting with tech's and they were going through the same procedures with me, time and again, before passing me on to one of the "top 10%" agents. So when you can't get a problem solved, you visit 2 agents every time you start a chat. We downloaded the "upgrade.dmg" file and erased the Mac volume on the MJ several times (my protests at the repetitions fell, of course, on deaf ears). Finally, agent number 6 (this was at almost 9:30 in the evening) opened the Mac network window and added two new DNS IP addresses. And, lo and behold, it suddenly seemed to be working as the MJ displayed the correct number and indicated "Ready to call" in the center icon area. Although I tried to get an explanation as to why this should make any difference, the tech was unwilling (or unable) to supply one. But it was working!

OK, here are the two IP addresses for the new Domain Name Servers as entered by the MJ tech during the screen sharing session (I saved them for possible future repair work): 67.107.71.186 and 67.90.152.122. If you're not familiar with where this is entered on a Mac (this is an Intel Mac running the latest Snow Leopard OS X operating system), just open System Preferences > Network > Advanced. Under the DNS tab, click on the "+" at the lower left of the "DNS Servers:" box just before the line that says "IPv4 or IPv6 addresses". Add the first one and then add the next. After this, restart the MJ via its "Menu > Advanced users > Restart" option and you will have done exactly what made mine work.

After that, everything else was just playing and setting up my phone(s) in the house the way I wanted to. And I have to say that it really works very well. My broadband connection is ADSL with 1.5Mbps down and .75Mbps up, supplied by Qwest. The voice quality is very good and I have 3 or 4 different phones it works just fine with. I also have a switch in the line to allow me to use a FaxModem when necessary and, as far as I've been able to tell, software faxing (I'm using PageSender but I think the standard OS X fax program would work too) is working. This is nice as I have occasion to fax things several times a year but not nearly enough that I feel compelled to pay for internet fax or a landline to accomplish the task. While MJ does not advertise faxing as a standard feature (and I'm not sure how reliable it will be), it's a pleasant surprise to see it working.

There have been a few other issues, though. If anyone's generating a list of phone's that work or don't work with MJ, I've found that two old standard phones (with actual bell ringers), an AT&T two line phone, a Sony 900MHz wireless phone, an AT&T wall phone and a US West wall phone all work great. But a Panasonic DECT 6.0 phone (model KX-TGA820B) doesn't work (well, it rings and will answer, but there is no audio). Another disappointment is that none of the phones that displays callerID gets the callerID from the MJ. I've tried the 100K resistor trick but no joy. I wish callerID would work, but it's certainly not a deal breaker. Chat time with the tech's got one out of two to confirm for me that callerID is *not* passed on to the attached phone. Sure seems like a shortsighted thing to have it designed that way.

Another thing, from a Mac perspective, is that I like to suspend (enter "Sleep" mode) the computer when I leave the house and don't need it to be running. The Mac version of the MJ software is certainly not very elegant about handling the sleep process. It shuts down instead of suspending itself but it doesn't eject the MJ drive. So when the system starts up again there is an OS X nasty gram about how one should be sure to eject a drive before "removing" it. Also, the program seems to have some startup problems after it has been shut down this way. What I've found is that it seems to be best to just close the MJ program (in this case the drive ejects properly on its own) and I unplug it. That's a little annoying since, otherwise, the suspend for a Mac is a very quick and painless thing to do (I just tap the power button). As far as MJ is concerned, I'd like to just push the button to put the Mac to sleep and when I "wake" it again, the MJ should just start itself and carry on without missing a beat. If this could work smoothly it would be a very positive step. I haven't checked out how MJ handles a full shutdown, while it is running, so no comments on that ... yet.

But with MagicJack I can talk on the phone, send/receive faxes and use the MJ with about 3 phones hooked up via my house wiring. I would give MagicJack about a 4 out of 5 stars review. Additionally, I've had it running on my PC laptop (Windows Vista) and that's working smoothly. The contacts list is not saved in a common portion of the MJ drive so when I add contacts on the Mac, they don't show up when running MJ on the PC. I can manually save the .xml file that has the contacts in it on the Mac and then load them when running the PC, but that's the only way I can see to do it. It would be nice to at least have a simple way (i.e. in the MJ menus) to synchronize contacts between the two computer types with having to resort to a laborious manual process.

Anyone that has a solution that will let me see callerID on the MJ phone when running on the Mac, I'd appreciate hearing that as well. I'll write more on MagicJack when time has passed and I see how reliable it is and if any updates for some of these issues become available.