OMG! This thing works like crazy! Free phone! With bells and whistles!

Obihai makes a little doodad that sells for about $50 on Amazon, along with a smaller version that is a bit less. This doodad plugs into your router that comes from your cable modem (or whatever your broadband internet is). Then you plug a phone into it and go to their website and register. Then you go to the settings page and tell them what your google voice login is. Then you pick up the phone and call people for free. Total time elapsed, about 5 minutes, not including running up and down the stairs to your router.

You can also receive calls and get all of google voice’s benefits for free. Well, it’s free until Google decides to start charging for the service, but they’ve said that it will be free through 2012. If they start charging for the service, I will look into the SIP capabilities of this Obi thing, and then I will still have free phone service.

This is kind of hard to believe, but there it is. I’ve just set mine up today and called people and I’ve received calls on it, and the sound quality is just like the landline, and there is no annoying waiting or mystery attached to the call. And the setup was so simple I kept looking for the catch or the hard parts, and there weren’t any. As soon as I plugged it in, I got dial tone, and as soon as I filled in a couple of spaces on the registration page on the web, I had a phone, complete with phone number, caller ID, voicemail, etc. (whatever comes with google voice).

Go for it.