Friday, May 23, 2008

Boost your landline with VoIP


The PhoneGnome blog has a post today showing how to use the little $99 PhoneGnome box to give our landline a shot in the arm and bring than old landline into the 21st century.

Step 1: keep your basic landline costs under control

If you're stuck with a landline, because it's required with your DSL service, or because you want landline 911, or any other reason, there's no use paying more than you need to for it. Services like 3-way calling, call forwarding, etc. are expensive from the phone company, even if purchased in a bundle. In order to get the cost of a landline down, you need to remove all those features - basic landline service can be as low as $3 to $5 per month (approx $10 per month with all the fees/taxes). But you lose the features - by connecting up a PhoneGnome box to that basic line, you get most of the call features back - free - without monthly fees.

And beyond those basic calling features, you get a whole slew of new features the phone company doesn't offer at any price, starting with voicemail to email - also free.

Step 2: Cheap long-distance calls

With PhoneGnome connected, you can keep using the landline for inbound and outbound local calls, while avoiding using it for more expensive toll and international calls. Activate a VoIP plan and all your toll calls will use the Internet at greatly reduced costs (sometimes even free).

Step 3: Mobile and more

If you're the kind of person that likes to keep things simple, there's not much you need to do to use PhoneGnome as shown above to save money and continue to enjoy features. On the other hand, if you like to take things to the limit, PhoneGnome lets you do that too, working with your mobile phone, PC, web sites, and VoIP services.

Probably one of niftiest "advanced features" is PhoneGnome's mobile integration capabilities. You can have your cell phone(s) ring with your home phone when someone calls your home number. You can check your voicemail from your cell phone with "Visual Voicemail". You can sling your home phone service to your mobile phone - to name just a few.

Summary

In short, just because you've decided to keep a landline, doesn't mean you have to pay a fortune for it or that you need to be stuck in the dark ages in terms of features. Just connect a PhoneGnome box to that old landline and enjoy VoIP features and cost savings along with landline reliability.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

PhoneGnome adds SMS beta

PhoneGnome added the ability to send SMS from your My PhoneGnome account. The rates look better than Skype's to most destinations.



Next, they need to add an API call for doing this to their (rather comprehensive) collection of free APIs.

Check out the company blog for details: PhoneGnome adds SMS sending