voice

now that we have paid $50 or whatever for qwest phone service to be installed in our home (+ $27/mo after taxes and fees), i think i have a brilliant idea for cheap phone service:

google voice is more or less here, and basically its function is to give you a single phone number that people can call which will forward calls to ring on any and all of your phones - home, cell, work, you name it.  that's kind of awesome because that means that people don't have to try each of your numbers individually to track you down.  the downside is that in terms of home phone service, you still have to have a landline.  in reading the comments on an article about the service on cnn, though, i came across a user who combines google voice with a magicjack and bypasses the normal monthly landline charge.  color me intrigued.

according to magicjack's website, you pay $40 for a little flash drive sized gadget that lets you plug in a normal home phone on one end and plug the device into a usb port on your computer on the other, and voila, home phone service.  $40 for the gadget and first year of service, $20/year after that and you get unlimited local and long distance calls plus call waiting and caller id.  there are pretty mixed reviews online - some people think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, others can't get it to work for the life of them.  but there's a free 30 day trial, apparently, so i think i might order one and give it a whirl.  there are definitely downsides - 1) we have laptops, rather than a desktop, which means that having our phone plugged into a usb port could be a little bit cumbersome; 2) the magicjack only works if your computer is up and running with good internet signal, but ours usually are.  if it works, though, it could easily save us $280-300/year - and would let us place long distance calls from our home phone.  add the convenience of google voice's free single number to reach us anywhere, and you've got a pretty sweet setup.