magicJack and magicJack Plus Support, Reviews, FAQs and Tricks

I just bought a 2nd jack. I wanted to have a phone number in another part of the country which would forward calls to my first (local) jack.

It installed no problems. I registered it using the same email address as my first jack. I can manage both from the same account. Made and received calls within 2 minutes. Setup call forwarding. They come through to my first (local) number seamlessly.

It's strange how so many people have problems. I've done two now without a single problem.

BTW: I didn't understand the registration screen where it asks you to "agree to accept free incoming calls (recommended)." I didn't understand the purpose of that, or what would happen if I didn't.


Mark

Until recently, I've never had a true problem with my MagicJack either... and I'm a user from July 2007. I had one faulty one, they replaced it promptly, and I've been a frequent user of it... so no issues really.

The problems though, is when something minor goes wrong, the support just really isn't there. The cookie-cutter (read: copy and paste) answers sometimes don't answer the issue.

But then again, with an infinite amount of variables due to the differences in machines, OS, user aptitude, et al.

az2008 wrote:BTW: I didn't understand the registration screen where it asks you to "agree to accept free incoming calls (recommended)." I didn't understand the purpose of that, or what would happen if I didn't.

Mark,

When installing my magic jack, I was confronted with a prompt which said something like, 'register for magicJack outgoing service.' I didn't understand what this meant, so I did a 'Live Chat' session right then and there, before finishing the registration process (unfortunately I don't have a record of that chat session).

The first representative could not tell me what it meant, so the session was turned over to a higher level. All that the next representative could tell me was that it was necessary to check the box, otherwise the magicjack would not work. So why ask the question, if unchecked the magicjack would not work, I asked. She had to go and ask someone else.

Well, in the long periods between questions and non-answers of the chat session, I found the Terms of Service page on magicjack.com, read it, and discovered the answer for myself. This particular piece of gobble-dee-gook meant that to place outgoing calls for free you had to check the box.

I don't remember a checkbox to receive incoming calls, but I am guessing that if you didn't check it, you wouldn't receive any phone calls, at least not for free.

The TOS is quite specific about differentiating between free incoming and outgoing calls:

4. What Is Free and What is Not:

The magicJack device allows you to receive for free incoming calls using the phone number we assign to you. If you register for magicJack outgoing service ('magicOut"), the magicJack device allows you to make free outgoing calls to other magicJack device users located anywhere in the world, and the subscribers on traditional telephone networks or cellular networks in the United States...

The higher level representative could find no other information as to what the prompt meant. When I quoted this passage from the TOS, she said she 'missed that one'. I have my doubts as to whether or not she had ever read the TOS.

FredFriendly
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FredFriendly wrote:[TOS says:]The magicJack device allows you to receive for free incoming calls using the phone number we assign to you. If you register for magicJack outgoing service ('magicOut"),

Thanks. Someone should schedule a monthly reminder to post the ToS to the wiki. Then, using the history feature of the wiki page we could see how it changes from month to month. I know it's changing because I never saw some of this stuff last June. (And, it used to mention something about an uninstall tool. That's gone.).

I don't know what they're trying to accomplish with that registration question asking if you agree to allow outbound calls. I thought by buying the thing I'd agreed to that. And, before or after that screen I had to agree to the ToS.

That question didn't make sense at all. It (and the changes to the wiki) make me wonder if they're not planning a significant change to the service.

Mark

Just an update. In another thread someone reported that MJ's high power requirements burned out his USB ports.[1] I replied that it seemed like something had gone screwy with my USB ports after beginning to use MJ.

However, after plugging in my 2nd MJ (to register it), my USB problems went away. I thought it was strange when I plugged it in that my computer went through a "new device found" sequence, installing drivers, etc.

My 2nd MJ is the 3rd generation device.[2] (My first MJ is 2nd gen.). So, I'm thinking it comes with different device drivers, or different USB hardware causing Windows to load different drivers?

Whatever it is, I don't get the erratic mouse movement like I used to. My mouse used to die. I had to disconnect/reconnect it to get it back. I haven't had that problem for a week.

[1] http://www.phoneservicesupport.com/post27816.html#27816
[2] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MagicJack/ ... rations.3F

Mark

az,

You got the "New Device Found" bit for two reasons, both related to how USB works. First, being revised/re-engineered hardware, it truly is new hardware and has the real possibility of requiring different drivers than the old version.

Second, unlike PCMCIA, USB recognizes each individual device by both its ESN and the port to which it is connected. For some reason I haven't figured out, removing a USB device from one jack on a PC and plugging it into another will beget this process. I can only imagine that this allows engineering flexibility in allowing for a way to have two different configurations for one device or to distinguish between two identical devices attached to the same PC.

As Dennis Miller would say, "That's just my opinion. I could be wrong."