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I read some of the fine print right on the Magic Jack website. If I understand it correctly, their infomercials are somewhat deceptive.

It seems that MJ is its own phone network. You pay $20 for the jack and a $20 annual access fee. You can call anyone anywhere at no additional cost, if they are members of the Magic Jack network.

The infomercial implies that you can call anyone anywhere. However, if you call a real telephone number outside the MJ Network, you get charged an access/per-minute fee. So your cost can run much more than the advertised $19.95 per year.

So you would end up porting your “real” phone number that you have right now that would only end up working on the magic jack network?

That doesn’t seem correct to me.

^^^^^^^^^^^You can call anyone anywhere at no additional cost, if they are members of the Magic Jack network.^^^^^^^^^

Maybe they have an additional charge for regular phone calls.

The infomercial implies that you can call anyone anywhere. However, if you call a real telephone number outside the MJ Network, you get charged an access/per-minute fee. So your cost can run much more than the advertised $19.95 per year.

You can call any phone # in the Continental US (lower 48) and Canada for free, that has a land line. I am not including calls to satellite, radio phones, etc... You can receive most calls from any part of the world, additional charges might be incurred by caller, but they should be the same additional charges that they already pay, when calling your home land line phone, from their country.

While traveling I have mine hooked up to a Dell laptop (Insprion 1100) with a headset connected, some hotel telephone equipment are programmed in a certain way that MJ might not work with them, while staying at a hotel that provides Internet access. Calls made to my MagicJack #, both from my home local area & long distance were received with the laptop. No additional charges were incurred to the caller, that would not have occurred when MJ was connected to my home lines. Even though I was 100's miles away from my home.

If I used MJ for business purposes, and had a group of customers in a different city. I would consider purchasing this device, and set set a local # for that City. This way a salesperson can receive calls from that clients in that city, and not have them incur long distance charges. Maybe for a small company, this will help avoid incurring additional costs, and not having a need getting an 1-800-XXX-XXXX Number. And send with my salesperson another MJ device, with a number in the company's local area, so when they call back to the office with updates of the business trip, the business does not incur long distance bills.

And another interesting way to use this device, for a person that has family all in the same area code, or region, and they live 1000's miles away from them. Buy this device, and hook it to a separate phone, get a phone number that is local to the relatives, or won't cost them a lot of long distance charges. And have them call that number, so you will create a "Family Hot-Line"!!! Just a thought.

"You can call anyone anywhere at no additional cost, if they are members of the Magic Jack network."

I have MJ, and that is flatly false.

You can call anywhere in America. Overseas calls can be made by prepaying minutes. Calls to Germany, for example, are $0.02 per minute. The overseas network is AT&T, so quality is excellent.

Your MJ experience will depend on your Internet connection's quality and, to an extent, the computer it's running on. It consumes about 90kB/sec when in use.

A Linux implementation will be very nice, as Linux is happier and more stable than Windows being run 24/7, and you will be able to use cheaper hardware. But for now, it supports Mac and Windows and does its job well.

Its major advantage vs. Skype is that you can use regular phones with it. We have our MJ connected to a wireless phone, so the whole house is covered.