USB Skype Vbox - Home/Office Telephone Adapter for Skype

by Voodoo

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• ASIN: B000B8Y5PC
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #14 in Electronics > Office Electronics > Telephones & Accessories > VoIP > Adapters
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 10, 2004

Product Description

Fedora Core 3 (Skype also supports SUSE 9, Mandriva 10.1 and Debian 3 or newer. However, Linux support for Skype add-on hardware is presently extremely limited. In the case of the SkypeMate software used in this article, it is limited to Fedora Core 3 only)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Buyer Beware - Major Driver/Software Issues, September 21, 2009

By 

John "John" (Raleigh, NC, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: USB Skype Vbox - Home/Office Telephone Adapter for Skype (Electronics)

I have had this device for about 6 weeks now and the drivers for this device makes it border-line unusable. To use this with a computer, you must install the Yealink software (Skypemate) which runs in the background as a service. However, this software is poorly coded and also contains a memory leak. This program will crash without warning once the memory leak gets too large (this may only be an issue if you leave your computer on all the time). Also, this program often times crashed while running. (cutting off a phone conversation minutes into it)

I checked online and this is a common problem. I have tried both an older version of Skype (3) with an older driver(included on the CD) for this device and the newest version of Skype (4) with their newest driver (downloaded from their website) and still have had problems. I have tried this on two computers (one with a completely fresh installation) running Vista Pro 32-bit with all service packs.

I will be buying a different phone/adapter for use with Skype as I am tired of having the adapter drop the phone call after talking for 4 min, or not accept incoming calls at all since the program crashed. Also, enabling the CID functionality causes the device to not work at all.

The hardware itself is rock-solid and if they released a well tested, good driver, this would be a steal. Too bad Yealink has not invested money into decent software.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Works great for me, September 17, 2010

By 

D. Houston "Legal Eagle" (Louisville, KY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: USB Skype Vbox - Home/Office Telephone Adapter for Skype (Electronics)

I bought one of these a few years ago and plugged the cordless phone system at my house (5 phones) into it. It has worked well for me with my Skype account on voice calls and I really have no serious complaints about the device. There are 2 drawbacks I should mention. First, the way this thing works you have to pick up your regular old analog phone and dial star (*) 00 and then the country code, area code and phone number you want to call (the country code for calls to the USA of course is 1). After you plug your regular phones into this device you cannot just pick up your phone and make a local call by dialing just the prefix and number like you could on regular land lines. You have to dial all outgoing calls as long distance (with country and area codes) even if you are just calling a house across the street. So there is a little extra dialing involved and you must dial *00 to make an outgoing call. That has not been a big inconvenience to me. The second drawback to this device is that it will not work unless both plugged into your computer's usb port AND your computer is left on. If you are keeping your old landline and just adding this for international calls, your old landlines will work even if your computer is turned off, but so long as your computer is off you will not be able to use this to place calls over the Internet using Skype. I am happy with it, and have had no software problems (one thing you do have to do once you install the Skypemate software is open your Skype account software on the same computer and set Skype to allow the Skypemate software to use Skype).

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Works awkwardly, November 15, 2010

By 

Brent L Bergwall - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: USB Skype Vbox - Home/Office Telephone Adapter for Skype (Electronics)

If you are looking for something to make Skype work as easy and reliably as a normal phone this is not quite it. The software crashes/locks up every few days but can be restarted easy enough. Dialing 00 before and then # after the number is hard to get use to but after a month I am about there. Other than that it works great!