I realize I've been a bit hard on Ooma. It's not that I don't think it's a nice idea, I just think the implementation has too many potential downfalls.

In the interest of being fair-and-balanced about the whole thing, I present Jonathan Greene's real-world experiences with Ooma. A few choice quotes after the break.

From the post announcing Ooma's arrival:

When everything is connected and plugged in, Ooma auto-connects and configures itself. The lights blink and after a few seconds you are ready to set up your greeting and voicemail. This is the usual stuff - nothing really to report on this other than I had no issues. When Ooma is active on your phones you get a new dial-tone to let you know it's on. You also get a visual reminder on both the Hub and Scout with the blue status light. If you lose power or have a network problem, the light turns red and you are back on copper.

The hardware certainly looks and sounds like it's well designed. Ease of use is always good. Never said that wasn't going to be the case.

So far Ooma seems like a nice addition to our home telephone set-up, though I'll be very interested to hear what my wife has to say when she sees and uses it for the first time. It does seem like a very friendly consumer design and other than the fact that we now have another small box on the kitchen desk (her desk!) I like how the boxes let you see you have a voicemail... perhaps now we'll be better about actually listening to home voicemail messages!

Passing the wife test is important. It's the main reason I haven't tried anything like this on our home phone lines. I mess with a lot of the technology in the house, but that's not something I've been willing to mess with. I haven't even tried PhoneGnome on our home line, despite having a very good understanding how the service works.

From Jonathan's Ooma Day 1 post:

My wife seems pleased (outside of the call disconnect) and was really very happy to learn we could SEE we had a voicemail AND that you could access things without even having to dial!

Yay for Jonathan. And yay for Ooma. I suggest following Jonathan's blog for further developments on his usage.