Aren't most cell calling plans now more or less unlimited minutes? And I don't know about magic jack for cellphones, but I do know it has saved a bundle in my household!
Depends on the carrier, and the plan you have. But, say you have a 1500-minute plan that costs you about $150-180 per month, and you make most of your mobile calls from home; you could cut back to a plan that costs about $50 and still have a few minutes for when you make calls outside the home - and with no loss of convenience. For $20 per YEAR after the purchase of the device for $40.
Seems a bit backwards to me though Nabo. If you are at home, why wouldn't one simply use the normal magic jack in the first place? Soo not a cellphone guy (basically privacy issues, carrying around my own personal GPS locator beacon never appealed to me) so maybe I'm just missing the benefit?
Padre: I come as a representative of the younger generation. To a large degree most of us do not even have landlines hooked up in our homes. Cell phone is the only line we got. Just looked it up and 16% of people in 2007 had no landlines connected to their homes with 13% relying exclusively on cell phone use. That's up from just 5% in 2004. Overall this is probably a bad move by Magicjack...I smell a lawsuit big time. I certainly wouldn't want to get in a legal battle with Verizon, you would call to reach a settlement and they would have you on hold for 45 minutes.
A younger generation that does not care about privacy... I can understand not having a landline, "but" the magicjack is a phone line that runs off of your DSL, instead of the miniature cell tower, you can simply plug in your phone to the computer, the mini tower is not needed. That is unless one does not want to monkey around with 2 phone numbers, but still, it is nothing to add a phone number to a cellphone's memory. Low return, high risk, I bet there is some caveat to the cell phone bandwith plans that excludes such a low power set up, but still years in court will bankrupt a company.
Pretty solid argument there. Also, it's GSM only right now. So Sprint and Verizon phones won't be in play.
Privacy from short-area neighbors indeed. But it's already common place for your web activities to be monitored by big brother. And cyber criminals to a lesser extent. Google is getting there too.
Somewhat, if one wishes to monkey around with your MAC address and not use IE or Media Player or Office and alter your GUID's as well as use a proxy tunnel and Linux etc, it can be done. But the idea of carrying around a GPS unit that monitors and logs my movments for as long as I have a cellphone with a battery in the thing is a bit much for me at least. As for Google...I'm a dolphins fan....a real big dolphins fan...
I have to test these types of things for work. I tried magicjack, hated it within an hour. I successfully made 1 call and had my computer lock up about half a dozen times.
Simplicity; one phone number, anywhere you go. Think of it this way: landline, $30 a month (LOW end); mobile, unlimited $100 a month; That's $1560 a year, plus long distance if you use it from home. With this, It's $40 for the unit, including the first year's service; thereafter it's $20 a YEAR; add in basic mobile at about $35-50 a month, and that's $440-620 a YEAR...and no extra minutes charges, or long distance charges - ever. That's almost an extra $100 a month savings.
