Voip service can save you a lot of $$ vs. a standard land line phone.

About a month a go we started using Magic Jack for a second phone line in our home.
Hubby works from home on Saturdays and Sundays and needs a dedicated phone line for work purposes, but we didn't want to get one from our phone company.  Magic Jack so fits our needs.

Magic Jack can be purchased for $39.95 plus shipping and handling on their website  that includes a year of service, and then the yearly fee after that is just $19.95!

Many people are dropping land lines and only have cell phones these days.  If you are one of those people consider Magic Jack as an inexpensive backup to have around for calls where you know you many be on the phone for long periods, don't want to tie up your phone, don't want to waste costly monthly cell phone minutes, or drain your battery.

Magic Jack is easy to set up.  Simply plug the dongle into a USB port and it installs the software immediately on your computer.  There is nothing else to install, and the set up for your phone umber and options has you running your new "phone" in literally minutes.  Since you can choose to use a headset or an actual telephone to use with it, it's very versatile depending on your needs.

So far Hubby has been very pleased with it. It works reliably, even when forwarding calls from his office phone to the Magic Jack number.

There was some echoing when he first started using it, but a quick adjustment of some of the controls solved that.

One thing to note is that your computer needs to be running for this to work (seems obvious but that may be overlooked by people who may not be completely tech savvy).  If you're using it in place of a land line, you can't turn your computer off.

The only downsides we could find were that the website is not very user friendly.  You have to do quite a bit of searching in order to figure out how to configure and set up your voice mail.  There also is a lot of advertising bombarding you even after you have your year of service after the trial period.  That gets a little overwhelming when you're trying to find information.

The other thing we'd like to change that you can't is how many rings happen before voice mail pick up.  It is set at quite a high number and there is no option to make it fewer rings. 

All in all if Magic Jack continues working as it has, we'll continue using it as a second phone line, when our first year of service is up.  The cost factor outweighs the other issues by a long shot.

If you currently subscribe to an long distance plan through your phone provider you may want to look into Magic Jack as it includes long distance within the US and Canada within your year of service.

You can visit MagicJack.com to see how you can get a free trial for 30 days!

I received a complimentary Magic Jack with a free year of service to use in my home for the purpose of this review post.