uReach.com - Sliced Bread can’t even compare to it!
Written: Jan 13 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It's FREE!, Your own toll-free number, great integration
Cons: Only 30 minutes free, Web site has some glitches
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| eGnome's Full Review: uReach |
This is BIG! It’s not just that you can listen to your email, or that you can have anybody leave you a message at your toll-free number, or even that you can view your faxes with a web browser…it’s the fact that uReach.com gives you all of this and a whole lot more all in one place for FREE! I hope there are plans for a new toll-free exchange because once people find out about uReach the “877” toll-free exchange is going to be used up quickly.
I’ve been using the site for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve tried to at least test out most of the features, but there’s so much there I’m sure I’ve missed some. Here’s why I think this site is better than sliced bread…
PROS:
First things first…uReach.com gives you your very own personal toll-free number when you sign up. Actually they give you an 877 number (Toll-free just like 800 and 888 area codes) with a 3 digit extension, but you can immediately upgrade for free to your own 877 without an extension if you provide them with a valid credit card number. I would assume that they require the credit card for a couple of reasons, one to weed out the people who just want to try out the service and won’t use it very frequently, and two, to be able to charge you if you want to use more than your allotted 30 free minutes per month. I personally had no problem giving them my credit card number so I could get my own toll-free number. Others may balk at this, but then they can still have the 877 number with the 3 digit extension.
Second you get an email address of username@uReach.com. Yeah, yeah..I know…yet another email address…but wait…the great thing about this free email address is the integration with the whole uReach.com service which I will explain further in a little bit. (This is starting to sound like a Ginsu knife commercial…”but wait…that’s not all” :-)
In addition to the toll-free number and email, you get all of the following for free: Voice and fax mailbox, online address book, online calendar, file storage space.
Big Deal you say…you can get that kind of stuff from a whole list of internet sites for free. Yes you can, but what they don’t give you is the integration and convergence between the internet and the traditional phone network. How many free email sites like Yahoo!Mail let you call your own toll-free number and LISTEN to your email! What other service allows you to call your friends to leave voice mails and allows them to receive the voice mail through their web browser? What calendar service allows you to call a toll-free number and have your appointments READ to you over the phone? Where can you find a service that allows you to send a fax for free and have the recipient get it anywhere in the world from a standard web browser? Where can you get a free “follow me anywhere” toll-free number that forwards your calls to any phone number based on your schedule? Where can you get all of this all in one place? uReach.com…that’s where! Can you tell that I think this is a great service?
Ok…just in case you got lost in that rhetorical blather here’s the abbreviated list of features that uReach.com offers for FREE
- Your very own toll-free number (30 minutes/month)
- email
- address book
- calendar service
- storage space (25MB I believe)
Those are the main free features. Now I’ll go into how they make those features stand out from others that companies that provide similar things.
Like I said earlier, you can use the toll-free number to have friends leave you voice mails or faxes. You can have uReach forward any calls at your toll-free number to any other phone number based on your schedule. For instance, from 9am to 5pm you could have the number forwarded to your work number and evenings to your home number and weekends to your cell number. You can also use the toll-free number to call and have any emails read to you via “text to speech” software. If you need to check your appointment book you can call the number and it will read you your appointments. You can also send email from any phone. Just call your number and follow the prompts to send an email to anyone in your address book.
Your free email is integrated with the whole service. You can do all the standard email functions like receive/send/forward, but you can also send email to any fax machine. You can even send an email from the phone.
The address book is used for your contact information and is accessible both through the web and the phone. The site facilitates importing existing address books from Palm Pilots and from Outlook.
The calendar is pretty cool too because not only do you have access to it from any web browser, but you can also call your toll-free number and listen to your appointments or to-do list. The calendar can also be shared with other users if you choose to do so.
Other features
If the features I’ve mentioned so far aren’t enough to convince you to check out uReach.com then here are some more goodies…
Web based bookmarks. Tired of not having the same bookmarks on your browser at work as you do on your browser at home. Well just put them on your uReach account and you have access to them no matter what computer you’re on.
uReach has a concept of “rooms. There are private, shared, and public “rooms”. You get a private room with your account and you can create shared rooms where you can share information with other uReach.com users of your choosing. The public rooms are obviously accessible by all users. It’s a great way to easily share files and your calendar/schedule with friends and family. They also have a chat feature to chat with other uReach users.
CONS:
Although the slew of features I’ve described above is free there is a limit. You only get 30 minutes free per month (60 your first month) for your toll-free number so you should try to do most of your access through web, which is unlimited. Save the toll-free access for your friends calling you and when you’re at the airport and desperately need to check your email from a phone. The nice thing is that you can carry over up to 30 unused minutes per month to the next month. Try to find a phone company that will do that for you. If you want or need to use more than the 30 minutes of free time then uReach.com will gladly charge you $.10/minute for each additional minute you use the toll-free number. I’m not sure what happens if you hit the 30 minutes and you haven’t given them a credit card. I would assume you’d get a message when calling your number saying that the 30 minutes is up and you can’t leave a voice mail or access any features.
The web site has glitches here and there and can sometimes have a little slow response, but nothing unreasonable for a new startup like this. I’m sure the uReach.com engineers are diligently working on any problems that crop up.
The implementation of the web site is not perfect. I had some difficulty importing my address book from my old Palm Pilot. Maybe newer versions of the Palm work better. I had more success with Outlook though. Once I got all my contacts into the address book I realized that I wanted to delete a lot of them, and this was a very slow process. I imagine that as the site matures they will improve the usability a bit more.
I can’t say that I particularly like the color scheme they have chosen for a lot of the web pages, but that’s really a minor point.
You can’t call your number and listen to faxes or read your voice messages, but I realize that these are much more difficult and less proven technologies (OCR and speech-to-text), and can’t really say that they would add much to the service.
OVERALL:
I can’t adequately describe the usefulness of the uReach.com service. You must experience it for yourself. I have no idea how this company is making money, but I’m glad they’re sharing there great ideas with us.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
eGnome
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Location: Red Bank, NJ
Reviews written: 51
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