After seeing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of commercials extolling the wonders of magicJack, we decided to take it for a test run. We did our research ahead of time and knew that there were two distinct groups of people: those who love magicJack, and those who hate it. We also read that the End User License Agreement makes users agree that they "also understand and agree that use of the magicJack devise and Software will advertisements." You can read the company's complete license agreement here.

We should start out by saying that magicJack doesn't have the friendliest of websites. This could be due to poor site design, or possibly on purpose. It's tailored toward sales, but not specific answers and customer service (for instance, their license agreement is impossible to search for through their site). Many users and blogs have also complained about the lack of a toll-free customer support number (magicJack relies on online chat help), but we'll get to that a bit later. One suggestion that someone made, which we firmly support, is to buy magicJack through a reputable retailer. While it may be convenient to order through magicJack.com, or through their sales number, it's much nicer to know that if you have to return your magicJack that you won't have to ship it back and wait for your refund.

With all this knowledge in hand we purchased the magicJack, plugged it in, and waited for the magic to occur. The first thing we discovered was that while the device isn't large, it is just wide and long enough to interfere with plugging other USB devices into an adjacent USB outlet on your computer. Also, they recommend plugging it into the back of your PC and not a front USB outlet, or USB hub (especially a non-powered USB hub). This caused us a few issues on our first test computer, but we unplugged our printer's USB cable from the back of the computer and moved it to the front to help negate this issue. The setup and registration of the device went flawless, and within a couple of minutes we were able to select our unique phone number and desired area code.

The first test call went relatively well, with the person on the other end stating that they heard nothing out of the ordinary as far as the call quality was concerned. That said, while the person on the other end didn't have any issues, we did notice an annoying issue of words breaking up every few seconds on our end. We tried a few more test calls, all with the same issue. A quick search on Google for "magicJack breaks up" led us to lots of sites with users experiencing the same issue. After looking for a fix and not finding one that worked, we turned to magicJack's website for help. As we mentioned earlier, magicJack uses an online chat system for customer service. The first person we chatted with had us change a bunch of settings on our computer and asked us to make test calls along the way to see if any of the changes worked. In the end, none of them worked. Finally, the representative inquired about our phone cord and began to imply that we weren't using a standard RJ-11 cord. To appease the representative, we switched the phone cord (to one that explicitly said RJ-11 on it, since she didn't seem to believe us that we were using a regular cord).

After the representative was unable to fix the issue, she transferred the chat to another representative. After more tests and system changes the problem still wasn't resolved. Around this time we came to the realization that the call breaking up was only occurring when speaking to callers in a different area code, and that calls placed within the same area code experienced no issues. The chat representative looked into it and said she figured out what the issue was and to unplug the device for an hour while the account changes she made propagated. A few hours later when we plugged the device back in we still had the same issues.

In an effort to give the best review that we could, we tested the device on a second computer. The results were nearly identical, although as we conducted more and more tests callers on the other end began to state they were experiencing issues hearing us as well.

While our experience with magicJack was less than satisfactory, we can at least commend magicJack's chat support team for trying to come up with a solution for us (other than the phone cord debate). In total we spent over three hours with online support and, fortunately, only about five minutes waiting in line at Best Buy to get a refund. While we can't give a positive endorsement of the device, we can suggest at least trying it out if you think it'd be a good fit for you with the hope that you won't experience the same issues. A few people we spoke to that have used the device speak very highly of it, but unfortunately the magic was a disappearing act for us.