Hands On Review: Vonage V-Phone

Last night I opened my phone bill only to discover $60 in long distance charges. What? I mean, I make a lot of calls, but $60 is ridiculous. Turns out I had made a single mistake: One 30-minute call to the 905 area code. Unknowingly, I'd spent half an hour on the phone to Canada, and that's billed at over a buck a minute as an international call. Whoops.

There's of course a simple solution here. I should have used Voice Over IP, which lets you make voice phone calls via the internet instead of a standard telephone line.

I've had a Vonage V-Phone sitting on my desk for weeks, and today I decided to give it a whirl. The V-Phone is designed to go anywhere you go. It's an orange USB key (and it even has 256MB of space you can use to store your files on) that's pre-loaded with the Vonage VOIP software. Just plug it into your PC and the software automatically loads. Inside of a minute you're ready to make calls. There's even a nifty feature that makes this a killer idea: A headphone/microphone jack is included right on the V-Phone. Just plug the headset (included) into this port and you don't need to fiddle with finding the right jack on your PC or messing with audio controls in Windows. The idea, of course, is that the V-Phone is so compact you can take it anywhere, just like you would a cell phone.

The only problem with the V-Phone is actually using it to make calls. Dialing and picking up calls through the simple software application are a snap. And the voices of those you're speaking with come through loud and clear. The catch is on the other end: Everyone we talked to complained that they could barely understand us and that audio was static-filled and garbled to the point of near incomprehension. Adjusting the volume controls didn't help, nor did several recalls: No matter who we called, we had the same problem, though in some cases it was worse than others. We aren't sure whether the issue is related to the Vonage service or the V-Phone itself, but we had no trouble making calls with Skype on the same machine.

The V-Phone itself is $40 and service runs $25 a month for unlimited calls. Fix that audio problem and I'm ready to sign up!