I love this product. I work from home and using my cell phone for conference calls was putting my cellphonebill.pdf into the 10MB sizes. So I went out and bought me a MagicJack and dropped my cell minutes. Also, don’t think you need a phone to use it. If you have speakers and a mic for your computer you’re good to go. Plug in the MagicJack and you get a Phone Application on your screen. Just dial away or answer any incoming calls. The best part is it sends faxes for you too. I plugged it into my HP OfficeJet printer and was able to fax anywhere in the US. Pretty sweet. I suggest you go out and get one.

More importantly though, I’m not writing to talk about how awesome the regular MagicJack is; I’m writing to talk about the potential of the MagicJack Femtocell (MJF). This thing turns your computer into a cell tower! The MJF comes with its own SIM card which you pop in your cell phone. Don’t have a SIM card? Sucks for you. You won’t be able to use it, here’s looking at you CDMA (Verizon and Sprint) customers. But for the rest of you, switch out SIM cards when you’re at home and after a few steps of sycning to the MJF you’ll be able to dial out to anywhere in the US and receive calls from any where in the world using your new MJF number without using any of your precious minutes. The device is supposed to have a range of 3000 square feet because it doesn’t want to cause any issues with the commercial GSM networks. You know the networks that we hold near and dear to our heart, AT&T and T-Mobile. At the moment the MJF does not support text and data.

Now I’m not a patient person. So I’m not sure how much I’m going to like this switching of the SIM card business. An easy fix for this is to go out and get a used GSM phone and not use your active phone when at home. That should take away the annoying factor. You know who’s going to find this very annoying? AT&T and T-Mobile. I’m willing to bet these guys are going to lay a fatty lawsuit down on MagicJack. They have to. There really isn’t other way around it. I don’t quite know the MJF works behind the scenes but it seems to me that MJF turns your computer into a cell tower using the GSM spectrum. MagicJack hasn’t purchased any of the GSM spectrum. AT&T and T-Mobile have. Which mean’s MagicJack, in theory, letting the consumer use AT&T or T-Mobile’s network for a very low cost. They’re like the Robin Hood of the mobile world. This can’t be legal. Also don’t forget the irony in all of this. Use myself for an example; I am an AT&T customer and pay a monthly bill for my cell phone. MJF wants to charge an additional cost to use the same network I’m already paying for! Granted it’ll be about $1.50 more a month for unlimited minutes from my house, but still kinda weird that I have to pay more for what I’m already paying for.

Overall, I’m torn about the MJF. It will force the cell companies to compete. There is no reason that at least smart phones can be VOIP phones when on a wifi network. But I’m not sure who’s going to buy the MJF. Regular phones are 15 bucks at target (I’m assuming this is much cheaper than a GSM handset.) and can give you unlimited calling at home with a regular MagicJack. If there was a work around to where there was no SIM card switching, I’d be all for it.  However, right now, it’s a good start but I don’t think it’s as revolutionary as the original MagicJack and does not give me a compelling enough reason to trade my MagicJack.

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