Customer Reviews

Phone Adapter for Skype

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I have used this device for about 2 weeks now. I purchased it at a local store for about $39. The device installed very easy, the instructions were not clear on how to make calls out. You have to press ##, Country Code, area code + phone number (ie for us calls ##,01,1-xxx-xxxx). It works with my desktop phone and cordless phone, no problems at all. I have also connected my landline to it, works like a charm.

Pros:
-Do not need to buy new phones to use skype
-You can choose better phones to use with skype that cost less
-Can use your regular phone line in addtion to skype.

Cons:
-Need to understand how to make calls first
-PC needs to be ON for it to work

This product just works right out of the box.

You can simply hook any old phone to the little box (preferably a cordless house phone) and if anyone calls you on skype it will ring on your cordless. Also, out of the box, and assuming you have SkypeOut credit available, you can call any telephone in the world from your connected house phone. Just dial like so:
Unhook to get dial tone, ##00, country code, area code, phone number, *

Suppose someone calls your skype account username from their computer: it will ring on your connected house phone. That's a free call. Out of the box.

If you want to make free skype to skype calls from your house phone, you have to do a little bit of work. One choice is to use an older version of skype such as 3.8 or earlier, because there was speed dial on those. Another is to download skypespeeddial so you can set your speed dials. For instance, suppose your sister's skype account is "daringfireball". You set this contact's speed dial number to be "3", for instance. You then dial on your connected house phone:
Unhook to get a dial tone, ##3*
That's a free call. Tip: After you have set her speed dial to 3, you can rename her contact in Skype to "daringfireball No.3" so after a while it will be very easy to remember that your sister is 3. Do not confuse renaming her contact to 3 which does nothing with actually setting her speed dial to 3.

Another tip: you can assign a speed dial to "Skype Test Call". So if you are in the garage and are somehow not sure your PC and rig are working, you just dial from your connected house phone and check Skype is on the up and up!

One easy way to have Skype on all your house phones is to buy one of these wireless systems where you have one base and as many as 4, 6 or 8 cordless that work as extensions of the same base. You simply hook the one base through the Zoom box and then all the cordless handsets all have Skype.

Having your main PC as your Skype telephone center can be a hassle: you must leave it on at al times. After testing this system for a number of weeks and making sure I liked it, I bought a refurbished netbook (Dell mini 9) with Windows XP and an 8-GB "drive" (it is an SSD so it has no moving parts). I set it so the screen turns off when I close the lid but the computer remains on. That's the machine that's hooked to the house phones. It runs nothing except Skype. You can enable VNC so you can access this little computer from your main PC, if you wish, to update stuff or whatever, so you never have touch it again. Tip: update anything that needs to be updated on this machine and then set everything on it to never update automatically. That way silly Windows will not interrupt your Skype when you least want it.

Skype released version 4 of its software earlier this year. The new version does not support speed dial, which is required for these adapters to work properly with a stand-alone phone. Not just this brand; all brands of adapters are now bricks.

I should clarify that if you dial out the phone number you are calling using your computer keyboard you can make calls. However there is no way to dial out a number from a stand-alone phone's handset... Which pretty much defeats the whole purpose of using an adapter and a regular cordless phone. Google "skype version 4 speed dial" to get the technical details, but the bottom line is that Skype cannot be used with a regular cordless phone for all practical purposes. Bummer.

The product works great, but has one major drawback. There is no driver available for Windows XP 64-bit edition. I did get it to work with Vmware, by installing a virtual machine with XP 32-bit, but that's a lot of hassle just to get this product to work. So if you have XP 64-bit edition, you might want to look elsewhere unless you want to fool with the virtual machine. Other than that it works as advertised, albeit with a slight learning curve. I might have given it 5 stars if it weren't for the lack of XP 64 driver support.

Update: I emailed Zoom tech support about the possibility of getting a XP 64-bit driver. Their response was that the Zoom 5900 has a chipset limitation that will not allow it to work with XP 64-bit edition (what a load of crap, they already have a driver for Vista 64, so the chipset evidently has no problem interfacing with a 64 bit architecture). It's obvious they don't want to commit any resources to making a driver for XP 64, and it's for this very reason that I'm changing my official rating to 2/5 stars. I like the product, but I don't like being lied to, and a product is nothing without good technical support.

Update #2: I recently upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit, and the Vista 64 drivers work perfectly with it. I can now use this adapter without a virtual machine! Sound quality is good. If there is any degradation in sound quality it is because of Skype, not the adapter.

3/5 STARS

I have used my Zoom adapter in conjunction with Skype for about 6 months and have had zero problems with the device. Installation was quick and simple and use is intuitive enough that I have never really looked at any instructions.

This unit offers a huge improvement in quality and ease of use over the headset/mike combo usually used with VoIP.

CEH 6/02/08

I was in search of a Skype phone adapter that would work in Vista 64-bit. This one does and the installation was flawless on my Vista Ultimate 64-bit system using Skype 4.1.32.166. I downloaded the lastest driver from the Zoom Web site, then fired up Skype and installed the driver. I then plugged in the included USB cord from the adapter to my PC, the cord from my phone jack into the line port on the adapter, and finally the included phone cord from my Panasonic DECT cordless phone into Phone port of the adapter.

I placed a call by dialing ##. After dialing ##, you'll hear a steady tone that is higher pitched then the standard PSTN (landline) tone. I then dialed the 001 number code followed by 1+areacode+number and a *. The * sends the number to the adapter. I immediately heard the "bubble" familiar Skype dialing sound on my phone, and the cell phone I dialed rang within 3-4 seconds. I then hung up the call, and the Zoom adapter went back to standard TELCO mode. The adapter makes a noticable clicking sound when switching from TELCO to VOIP mode, but this certainly isn't a showstopper (at least for me).

I then dialed my Skype online number using my cell. Skype acknowledged the call and the Zoom adapter rang the phone within 2-3 seconds. The caller ID on my phone DID register the caller information. I left a message on my cell to hear a sample of the voice quality which was pretty good.

Next, I tried a call to one of my contacts and their cell phone. Voice quality was good on my end, and on their end I was told the quality was good. They stated a couple of words were a little hard to understand.

I haven't verified the speed dial issue that supposedly occurs with Skype version 4+, but the phone directly dials numbers just fine when entering the appropriate code. I also have not tested the 3-way calling or switching between a Skype call and a landline call when such as call comes in. If I get a chance to explore these features, I may return to update my review. I have also not used or will I use the answering machine feature. I have voice mail on both my landline and Skype, so I don't see a need for this personally.

The only feature I wish this Zoom adapter had is a call forwarding feature that forwarded Skype calls to another phone (such as a cell) using the landline. You can forward landline calls to Skype, but not the other way around.

All in all I am very pleased with this product. It's the only one I know of that works on a 64-bit system, and I was amazed at how painless the install was! I took a snapshot of the adapter in my office which I have included here as a customer photo. The adapter is pretty small and is not the same as the stock photo here on Amazon (as of 1/18/2010).

UPDATE 2/22/2010:
Thought I'd come back and update the review after a bit of regular use of this phone adapter. After one month of steady use, it has worked well for my needs and has worked flawlessly. I decided to ditch using the landline with it and am using it exclusively with a DECT cordless phone system for VOIP. Phone shows caller ID info of incoming calls to Skype (I have an online number.) I the phones to dial out and also listen to my Skype voice mails. For important numbers I dial frequently, I have them programmed in my phone using the 001 prefix, then the 1+areacode+number* combination.

I'm not aware of another adapter out there that works as well as this one.

I just installed it on Vista, and I think it's terrific. I wanted an adapter to be able to hook up my cordless and use Skype to make calls, but I was skeptical after reading a lot of bad reviews on other products (d-link in particular). A lot of people mentioned problems with drivers, call quality, etc, but I picked Zoom after reading the reviews here, and the product actually surprised me. The installation was a breeze, and it works perfectly, with the landline, without the landline, calls to Skype, calls from Skype, even if the computer is off you can still use your landline ... it's exactly what I needed.

I'm now gonna stop using the landline for a couple of months and use Skype only, and if that works I'll ditch the landline altogether.

In short, great product, totally worth the price. I actually got it from buy.com, where they have a $[...] dollar off deal if you signup for a credit card, so it ended up costing me [...] bucks. Best deal ever.

I found this product by accident while at a local Walmart. My wife uses SKYPE to make phone calls to relatives who are in another country but hates using a headset mic so I thought I could give this a try. The price was under $40 which is similar to the cost of a good headset mic so I thought it worth the money.

Installation was pretty straight forward and in about 30 minutes I found I was able to talk to people on Skype using my regular cordless phone.
The clarity is outstanding!

The operating instructions are a joke which is why I did not give this product a 5 star rating. I went to Zooms web site and found a PDF manual which explained how to use your regular phone to dial SKYPE contacts by assigning them a speed dial number.

Other than that it is a great product!

This is an awesome gizmo. When I went looking for a Skype compatible phone or headset, I never thought I would find a gizmo that did all of the functions of this device. I was excited to find this but after getting it home and hooking it up I found even more features. It's a little pricey but since it works as expected that makes it worth it over junky inexpensive devices that never work reliably.

Driver software installed without a glitch (XP), just like all software should but verrrrrry few actually do.
It worked perfectly right out of the box (after driver installation).

It provides these awesome functions. * indicates that this feature is more than I expected to get.
Allows you to use any conventional phone (even a cordless phone) with Skype.
*Has an input for an additional phone line and easily juggles between the two, allowing you to use a single phone (or cordless phone that supports several handsets - that's the way to go) for both your Skype calls as well as your land-line calls without having to switch cables.
Works fine with Magic Jack feeding in as the additional line. Skype, Magic Jack, and this Zoom device all work together on the computer to great results.
For at least some functions it's controllable from the phone. You can choose Skype line or your other line from the handset, switch back and forth between the two lines, and control your local Zoom voice mail....all from the phone. Way convenient.
*Provides an answering machine function that saves your messages in WAV files on your computer. I never expected that advanced function from this device.
*It can bridge the two phone lines so that you dial in to your land line and ask Zoom to bridge your call over to your Skype line so you can call out that way.
*Almost provides a "no not disturb" function by forwarding over Skype and land line calls to the answering machine. Unfortunately you will still get at least one ring from the land line before Zoom intercepts the call.
It's a small device.
It does not require a power adapter...it picks up its power from the USB cable.

I bought this because when I use a headset with Skype, the called party always hears a buzzing noise. From my research it sounds like I have a ground loop.
I previously had tried the Netgear SPH101, which doesn't require a PC. While it worked good, the battery life was poor, and it lacked features I really wanted (i.e. 3-way calling). Plus it was UGLY.
This adapter allows me to use any phone I want, the call quality is excellent, and I have the conference call features of Skype. It's too bad the PC has to be on all the time, but that's what we're stuck with.
My hope is someday to see a cordless Skype PC-free phone, with some of the better features of Skype (conf calling), plus a lithium battery (why do they come with AAA batteries???), and easy to use embedded software.

I found only one negative with this. I can't tell it what country code and area code I live in, so all my calls have to be dialed 011+1+AC+#. I didn't deduct any stars for this because I find I use my Skype contacts to dial the number. Much easier.