Review: Vonage V-phone

A simple but effective way to make phone calls over your broadband connection

Vonage touts its V-phone as the world’s smallest phone, measuring roughly the size of a stick of chewing gum. In reality this is simply a USB drive with a headphone socket and pre-installed software to allow you to make calls over the internet.

The 250MB flash drive (there’s about 240MB free for your own use) costs a reasonable £19.99, but before you buy you’ll have to sign up for the ‘Residential Unlimited’ service plan, which gives you unlimited local and national calls to anywhere in the UK or Ireland for £7.99 a month.

You get your own personal number, which can be tailored to an area code of your choice, integrated voicemail and you can use the phone from anywhere with an internet connection, so cybercafés, your office or a friend’s house are all fair game.

Once you’ve plugged the USB drive into your PC the ‘Vonage Talk’ control pad fires up. You’ll find a contacts database and call history here, along with some basic functions to automatically accept or ignore incoming calls or block caller-ID delivery.

Call quality is obviously the main concern and, although you may need to tweak some sound settings on your PC, on the whole it’s fairly good. You can adjust the volume from your end with the standard volume controls on your PC, but calls did sound rather distant and quiet for the recipient so you do need to speak up and right into the microphone.

Those who access the internet through a wireless connection may need to tweak a few settings if quality drops, but for the most part we didn’t experience too many problems.

Whether or not you’ll find the Vonage V-phone worthwhile is really down to the £8 a month service plan and whether this would work out better value for money than other options available from BT.

Also consider:
Trendnet Clearsky Bluetooth Skype phone
The Bluetooth link can affect sound quality and it's a bit pricey, but if you're a big Skype user it's worth considering

Jajah VoIP service
A painless way to make free or very cheap calls and we look forward to the mobile version

Belkin Wifi Phone internet telephony
Not a bad handset, but is for Skype addicts only - provided you don’t usually use the instant messaging and video tools.

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