YMax magicJack ($39.95 including first year of service, plus shipping and handling, street, $19.95 per year thereafter) is a VoIP solution that saves you money by letting you make "free" calls in the U.S. through your computer, rather than paying for traditional landline phone service. Although PCMag has reviewed Magicjack in the past and liked it, the company's customer support has never been great. Additionally, when magicJack debuted, nothing else like it existed. That isn't the case anymore. In the face of competition, magicJack's poor interface, pushy attempts to up-sell you, on-screen advertisements for its own product, and general lack of support make it hard to recommend now.

MagicJack deserves a rating of fair in my testing because it did perform the primary function it claimed it would—it let me make and receive phone calls, but not until I'd asked more questions and done more legwork than I would have liked. It also serves ads (the landing page for the user Web portal is one big ad to sell you more magicJacks or upsell your existing unit), which I dislike in paid products. There are better products—with toll-free technical support and clear documentation—than magicJack, such as Editors' Choice netTALK DUO ($69.95, 4 stars), Vonage ($79.99, 3.5 stars), and Ooma Telo ($249.95, 3 stars). Those accomplish the same primary task without ads, without installing software on your machine, and with clear documentation and good live support. All these products, including magicJack, are physical devices that connect to a traditional telephone handset, but if you're willing to lose the phone itself, you could just use a computer-based service like Skype (free, 4.5 stars). The disadvantage with Skype is you have to leave your computer on to receive incoming calls (although you have to do this with magicJack as well), and it's only free when you call other Skype users. Skype charges for calls to landlines, cell phones, and non-Skype VoIP phone numbers.

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Features
All the VoIP services I've reviewed offer the following features at no extra charge: E911, voicemail, call-waiting, three-way calling, and call history logs. What magicJack doesn't offer that netTALK, Vonage, and Ooma do is toll-free technical support. MagicJack only provides online chat support. When I tested the online support, I had to click through six screens (which all tried to convince me that I did not actually need live online chat support) before the site allowed me to connect to someone. Six screens is excessive hoop-jumping. Technical support should be easy to reach and friendly. When I reached a person, I asked how much would it cost to transfer my existing phone number. The person responded by asking me if I wanted to change my number. I said, "No. I want to know how much it costs." Again, the agent posed me another question I didn't ask. So I repeated, "How much does it cost to transfer my existing phone number?" She or he finally answered that it costs $10 to request a specific phone number. Notice how the answer still did not address my exact question. I had now sunk approximately 15 minutes into the ordeal, and I was done.

Throughout my magicJack experience, I never found information I needed up front, when I wanted it. Everything from URLs to contact information to explanations of renewal process and costs took far too much digging to find. This lack of upfront information from MagicJack is reason enough to prefer the alternatives, especially netTALK DUO, which puts info—and two toll-free help numbers—at your fingertips.