magicJack and MagicJack Plus Support, Reviews, FAQs and Hacks

City Builder · MagicJack Contributor Joined: 03 Oct 2008 Posts: 68

I got my MJ about 2 or so days ago, and after reading some other posts about people that had difficulties with MJ and Windows Vista I was thinking I'd likely have to revert to using XP again, but I plugged it in, filled out the registration page and was assigned a number (more info on that below).

I made my first long distance call and initially was shouting on the line, the other person asked me why I was shouting and I had to apologize and explain that I felt like I was talking between two soup cans and a pice of string. It wasn't that the quality of the connection was poor, it was actually sounding better than the regular verizon house phone, it just felt strange to me even though I was using the regular cordless phone in the house. I then learned I don't need to shout, and that it works just like my verizon phone worked.

I was a bit disappointed to learn that for our local area code they didn't have any local prefixes for us so any friends or family in the area will end up incurring a long distance call to telephone us, though we won't incur any charge to call them or anyplace else in the U.S. so we make out good on that. We had a couple choices of prefixes to take, none of which were local so we took one that would be easy for people to remember (666). Sadly I would have liked to have gotten one in our regular prefix of 320 to 328 but none were available. I hope they eventually get some here and I'll use the onetime free phone number exchange to change it over.

The quality of the calls that I've made so far have been fantastic, sound clarity is great, and in fact I had to turn down the volume on the cordless handset because it was so loud where as with the verizon regular phone the volume had to be on high, now it's only set to about half.

We do a fair amount of faxing in and out of this home office to our Los Angeles office so this will certainly save us money on our outbound faxes since it seems to work perfectly for our outbound faxing, however inbound faxes is a horse of another color. We've now tried three seperate fax machines, lowered the speeds to the lowest they will go (9600 baud) and turned on error correction as well as tried it with error correction turned off to no avail. The incoming faxes refuse to work, so what was going to be a fantastic deal of 20.00 a year for unlimited phone will shortly turn into 120.00 a year so that we can use an internet based fax service to receive our faxes. Thankfully however we can just fax out from here and include the number the internet based fax service gives us in the header so people know where to fax back to. This is a big bummer to me however.

The only other thing that really bothered me is that even though it was supposed to be a free 30 day trial, they charged my debit card right on the spot which overdrew my account. I contacted their billing support who asked me "didn't you see the information that says if you use a debit card we will charge you right away", and "but your still eligible for the 30 day free trial if you want to return it we will issue a refund". Well $55.00 turned into 85.00, I guess I should have gone to the bank and just put the $55.00 into the account as I use one debit card for online purchases and only deposit money into that account when I am going to buy something online. Lesson learned sadly. SO IF YOU USE A DEBIT CARD, BEWARE IT WILL BE CHARGED RIGHT ON THE SPOT, NOT 30 DAYS LATER LIKE IT WOULD A CREDIT CARD!

Overall, we will still be saving about 250.00 a year and won't have to make the trip into town to pay the phone bill like we used to every 2nd month like we did in the past so it's a nice saving, however when you figure it out over a years time it doesn't feel all that great, but it's still money saved in these times when we need to save as much as we can.

As long as the quality of our calls remains the same it seems like it's a good deal and worthwhile, will be even more so if we actually start calling relatives around the U.S. more often than we ever did in the past which we plan to do to make up that 35.00 overdraft charge from the debit card mistake.

If I had to rate the quality of the phone calls I've made so far, I'd give it a solid 10, they have been clear and no echo's or delays. However factoring in that we now have to spend an additional 5.99 to 14.99 on a fax service to receive our faxes, I can only rate MJ as a whole at about 7 out of 10.

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pmascarenas · MagicJack Newbie Joined: 14 Oct 2008 Posts: 4

i received mine a couple days ago, plugged it into my pc running windows 2003 server thats sitting in the garage. it's always on for file sharing and such. no one ever logs onto it but me, magicjack installed itself, filled out all the stuff and received my number. was very amazed how simple it was and it sounds pretty good.
just locked the pc and i'm good to go. set my answering machine to pickup after 3 rings, so far everything works good.

Darkman90808 · Dan Should Pay Me Joined: 27 Feb 2008 Posts: 687

City Builder... please take the following comments in the spirit they are intended, i.e. I've loved my MJ from the moment I received it and plugged it in.

I believe, however, the most recent version seems to be working better than ever. I had some problems with mine early on. Some were my own creation, since I like to play with my new toys and we had the Caller ID spoofer at one time. However, like a number of the early adopters, my friends were getting pretty impatient with me and my little bundle of joy when they suffered from echos, drop outs, etc.

I never bought the MJ to replace my home phone service or to be a single source solution. I bought it for a very narrow requirement. The fact it works so well is icing on the cake. I'm glad it works for you and others out of the box. Lately, that seems to be a more common experience.

I went back to re-read your post before submitting this. IMO, you're not being realistic or fair about your criticism of the fax capabilities. MJ never claimed to be a solution for sending or receiving faxes. I've had limited success sending and receiving faxes, but frankly, I've only played around with it to see if I could. Lately, it seems to be working but I don't really care. If you're running a business and can't afford a $5.99 to $14.99/month expense for faxes, you might consider a different business.

Please forgive me if that sounds harsh but I truly believe the MJ performs as advertised. (Not everyone agrees with me on that one.) I hope it turns out to be wildly successful for Dan Borislow and everyone who bought one of his little gadgets. If not, I've had a great time and a fun ride!!

cdwaldron · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 12:42 pm Post subject: Fax with free recieve

City Builder

Thanks for a clear and honest review of your experience with the MJ. I really like mine but will not be using it as my main line until or unless number porting becomes available. I have used it on the road with great success.
Soon after moving my MJ to a HP Thin Client, I tried receiving and sending fax. No problem whatsoever (after I fooled around getting the settings correct on my multipurpose machine!)
You could also try efax for a free fax receiving option. I have had a number with them for a few years. I don't receive many faxes so I don't know if there is a limit on number of pages received. You also have to put up with what ever area code they assign you for the free service but if your main office is already sending faxes to you long distance, it shouldn't make any difference.
Please keep us abreast of how the MJ is working for you as you only phone.

City Builder · MagicJack Contributor Joined: 03 Oct 2008 Posts: 68

Thanks,
Other than this morning, everythings been going great with it. However this morning apparently a wide area of their service area went down, I dont know exactly how long but it was well over 2 hours here that I couldn't send out our morning faxes and make our morning calls.

Other than that, we use a j2 service for incoming faxes (unlimited from what I gather) and don't need outgoing since our fax works fine to send outgoing faxes.

There actually was one issue yesterday, one of the ladies in the L.A. office said that she tried to call me 3 times yesterday, and each time the person (she assumed it was me) on the other end couldn't hear her. By the 4th attempt at the call the person on the receiving end of her call told her to go F off. A which time she faxed me a stern letter saying that if I spoke at her with that kind of language again she would quit. I explained that she wasn't calling our number here as the phone hadn't rung.

She said it's on her office phone speed dial, and the 5th time that she tried to call it came through to here. Now I can't explain what happend, crossed internet lines maybe? Someone in the L.A. Office that had too much coffee, or the MJ system getting the lines crossed to another MJ user who was using his internet connection to download huge movies and which was making it so that he coudn't hear her on the phone for those 3 attempts. I don't know, but I am monitoring it more carefully now, and we are not disconnecting any land lines even if we have to pay for a few more months of service while we make sure that this will work for us.

VaHam · Dan Should Pay Me Joined: 13 Feb 2008 Posts: 838

City Builder · MagicJack Contributor Joined: 03 Oct 2008 Posts: 68

The way it's going this month, Im lucky Im not paying for inbound faxes as we've been overloaded with an absuredly large amount of incoming faxes, at least 3 months worth in about 1 weeks time.

The only downfall of the service that is free that I chose is that there is only one area code to choose from, so it's a long distance call for *anybody* to fax me, which sometimes actually comes out of my own pocket depending on who is faxing me and from what location.

Never the less, I do love getting the faxes in my email instead of wasint a lot of paper I can view them in the J2 viewer ad then print them out if I need a physical hard copy, otherwise they just get archived in my online email account in case I ever have to pull them up again to prove something.