As you might know, I am moving into a new office this week. We don’t require much out of an office other than a rather nice address for the business cards and internet; it serves as a home base, a place to land between site visits and trips to the data center. So with that, we’ve opted to work from our mobiles rather than install a phone system.

Now, that might not seem like too big a deal to you. Working strictly from a mobile phone is in no way uncommon. But those people aren’t working from my mobile. The number was originally a land line, I had it installed right before I went to Argentina in 2005. I worked for the phone company at the time so I oversaw the installation order and hand picked the phone number. It’s a great number and I intend to keep it. In the past few years I’ve ported it from land line to voip and finally to mobile.

With this in mind, I set out on a quest for a virtual phone number. I don’t need toll free service, I have no use for fax. My criteria were really pretty simple:

• The proper area code for my location.
• Voicemail capability.
• Calls had to forward to the number of my choice; not a static number and not my computer.
• I needed the ability to make outbound calls.
• No per minute charges.

Simple, right? Apparently not so much.

Not a lot of services offer the upstate South Carolina area code. Plus, the per minute charge was a deal breaker for several services, as was the outbound calling. After a bit of searching and getting some recommendations on FriendFeed, I happened across a service called Vumber. And before you ask: yes, that’s an affiliate link.

Vumber met all of my requirements above (you notice I didn’t specify a non-dorky service name) and has several other things going for it as well, not the least of which was the free 30 day trial. A good free trial is a beautiful thing, and being the value minded person I am I’m always willing to take advantage of one.

After the trial it’s $9.95 a month for up to 20 hours of usage. I’ve not had 20 phone hours for work any time in the past year, so this wasn’t an issue in my book. For those that are curious, checking your voicemail by phone does count against your time for the month. The flip side of that is the fact that you can listen to your voicemail online, so there’s no need to check it over the phone.

That $9.95 gets you a virtual number and voicemail box (see, Vumber makes sense now!) that will ring to whatever phone number you specify. You can add additional Vumbers to your account for $3.95 a month, or change your existing Vumber for $1.95 ( actually, the first three times you change the number are free).

The feature set of Vumbers are relatively simple, but interesting. The most intricate is how to direct incoming calls. You can set any of the six handling methods below via the online account interface or by dialing into your Vumber.

• Route calls to the number you’ve specified (in my case, my mobile)
• Send them straight to Vumber voicemail
• Busy signal
• Continuous ring
• Temporarily out of service message
• Disconnect message

You can see now why many of the reviews I found online were with regards to the dating scene… As an aside, if you have the calls ringing through to your phone and you miss the call, they are routed back to your Vumber voicemail box, not your standard voicemail.

Other options include what to pass to your caller ID (either the person who called you or the Vumber itself), what you hear when you answer (’press 1 to accept’, announce the originating number, or put the call straight through), and whether or not you want to enable emailed missed call notices. You can also set a PIN and alias for each Vumber.

The best feature for me, though, is the ability to place outbound calls. You add ‘registered private numbers’ to your account, and these numbers are able to place outbound calls through your Vumber. That virtual number is what winds up on the recipients caller ID. Perfect!

Blocking and speed contacts are the two remaining features. Blocking handles calls with anonymous/unknown caller ID information or other phone numbers you specify. You can route these calls to any of the call handling options above except to your number. Speed contacts let’s you specify frequently called or special numbers so that you can dial them more quickly as an outbound Vumber call. You also have the option to handle calls from your speed contacts as you would blocked numbers. Sounds like just the thing when you want to send a certain client straight to voicemail but be able to dial them back quickly. Not that I’d do that, of course. But someone might find it useful.

My method of using the service is going to be very straight-forward. I have my account set to show my Vumber when it calls, and that number is in my phone contacts as my work line. So my phone rings, the screen shows work line, and I can answer the phone properly. If I miss the call it goes to my Vumber voicemail which has a brief, work branded message. I can listen to that message from my phone, in my Vumber account, or via the email attachment they’ll send me.

And there you have it, an overview of the rather simple but perfectly adequate feature set of Vumber. I’ve received a test inbound call and placed a test outbound call. The call quality was fine, though there was just a hint of a delay. Thing is, the test call I made and received was from an overseas number, so the delay might have been due to that and not the service.

So far I am more than pleased with what I’ll be getting for my $9.95 a month. Once I get a chance to use the service a bit more, I’ll give an update.

Oh, and about that affiliate link: if you use it to sign up you get the 30 day free trial and I get a free month of service. Just wanted to be up front about it =)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Web Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.