Mobile / Cell Phone Thoughts & Reviews

I have been a heavy user of phone minutes on and off for many years now.  At my peak I believe once I hit 5,000 minutes in one month.  That may not be a lot for some but boy was it a lot for me.  Anyways I have always been very cautious about giving out my personal mobile number let alone my home phone number, but in the beginning I didn’t have a choice, I traveled a lot and didn’t want to pay the $50 or so a month for a business line.  Then over the years I’ve tried different services but none of them fit me perfectly.  None of them radiated the feeling of a full blown company, it always came across like I was a one man operation and that was not the way it was or what I wanted.

I came across Phone.com late last year when I met their CEO Ari Rabban (he usually twitters on the company twitter account) at a wine dinner Andy Abramson hosted.  Ari told me about their virtual phone service and I was instantly interested.  Was this the treasure in my search for telephone gold?  So I went home that night and took a look at Phone.com.  It was great, for the price of 1 lunch I was able to get business class phone service for a month.  Problem was, I travel and rely solely on my mobile phone.  I mentioned this to Ari and he said “just hang on for a couple months” so I did.  Then about 2 months ago I was invited into a beta group to test Phone.com’s new Android app and walla, my problems were solved.  I finally had a business class phone system in my pocket and everywhere I went.  I had an automated system with customizable greetings, extensions and the ability to set office hours, so my phone won’t ring in the middle of the night (some people just don’t understand time zones).  The best part was, I can have all of it on my Android phone.

Well the day is here and I’m finally able to talk about it publicly (I was under embargo until today). The new Android app is everything I have been wanting.  It gives me the ability to make calls from my cell phone which is nothing new, but it shows my work number in the caller ID not my mobile phones’ number.  This is one of the biggest selling points for me.  I like having ubiquity and not multiple numbers.  Along with that same point, I now have a work number that I can receive SMS (text messages) on, I have been testing it and it is flat out fast.  What’s nice is I can send SMS from the Phone.com website (as well as my phone of course), keeping me from having to type out messages on my phone.

Some additional points to note about the Phone.com Android app:

• Extremely simple set up
• Shares address book with phones built in address book
• Ability to send SMS from the phone showing your Phone.com number
• Very competitive international calling rates (some countries are even free)
• Cheaper minute plans then the mobile phone providers offer
• Unified inbox for voicemail, sms, and fax where you can read/respond to all of them
• Listen to and read (they convert VM to text) voicemail on the phone
• Office number is always with me
• Doesn’t seem to drain my battery
• Set up and initiate conference calls from your phone (this is amazing)

Keep in mind there is a Phone.com iPhone app as well that runs over VOIP, I will try to get my hands on an iPhone to review it.

In closing, I have been using this service for a few months now and really enjoy it.  I would personally recommend the Android  app from Phone.com to anybody looking to save money on their phone service.  From small to medium businesses to someone who may just want a second number but not another phone, this is your answer.  I give it my stamp of approval.

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