A Virtual Phone Number is useful. You pay a few bucks per month and get a number that you are not afraid to give out to people. You typically can get it to forward the call to any IP phone or real phone. It usually lets you "screen" the call before accepting it. It usually has voice mail.

For us the defining feature of Project Gizmo over Skype was their Area 775 service. They partnered with Callwave to give you this type of Virtual Number. It costed $4 a month. Phone calls would first ring Gizmo if your computer was on. Failing that it would ring your landline or cell phone. Failing that it went to voice mail and was emailed to you as a WAV file. Awesome.

This worked great for a while but now Google purchased Gizmo. The tech support from Gizmo is now virtually non-existent. They take over a week to respond via email and have no phone number you can dial. Their e-mail responses can’t be replied to. It’s bad.

On August 17th we received a letter from Callwave saying "Thank you for your business" and they just dropped our virtual phone number for no reason. At least their email support gets back to you within a day. They said that Gizmo did not reinstate their contract and so just "closed" our phone number. What we were paying $4 / month for they will happily charge us $8 / month. Forget that!

Long story short we found a British company called "Localphone" that offers a better product. It has a $3 one time setup fee and then just $1 / month after that for your virtual phone number. IP calls don’t cost a thing and landline / mobile calls are cost competitive with the cheapest calling cards. They have a lot of great features and a free SIP phone number for calling from the computer. It is way better than Gizmo and Skype ever was. Life is good again.