KMU-30A Review 1 August 2006, 07:22
Posted by Orhan in : Geeky Techy Stuff, Review , trackback
I have been wanting to post my eperiences about the KMU-30A regular phone adapter for skype but I also had been kind of lazy. Today I received a comment asking about the KMU-30A’s performance from azn, so azn, this is for you.
First of all, I purchased this item for my family back home so that they could speak to me on a regular phone set when I call them, and also they can call me on Skype much easier with the speed dial set up. I have only spent a few hours setting it up and assigning speed dials etc. and have been away from it since then.
Having said that, lets move on to the review.
1) Appearence: KMU-30A is one of the few regular phone adapters for Skype. It is compact, with light gray color. Once you put it on top of your desk or computer you will forget that you had such a device soon after.
2) Technology: KMU-30A is a USB device that has a built in sound card and an adapter that connects the audio in-out ports of that sound card to a regular phone. When you install it, you are basically adding a new soundcard to your computer so make sure you correct your default sound card to whatever it was before.
3) Installation: Before you plug the device in, install the software. As I said before, make sure you check your default sound card settings once you install and plug the KMU-30A to a USB port. Second step is changing the sound device preferences in Skype options to the KMU-30A sound device. I do not remember exactly the name that the soundcard appears as, but you will recognize easily. You should set both playback and recording as KMU-30A sound device.
4) Performance: Although I liked the general performance of KMU-30A, sometimes I (or the person at the remote location) hear myself as a very weak echo. As I said this does not happen all the time, and I do not know if it happens with any other regular phone adapter for Skype. I can hear the person using KMU-30A perfect. No problems there.
The speed dial function works very good. I had no problems with that.
The only thing that I could not make work was the incoming skype call forwarding to a landline. I was not able to make that feature work but I did not spend much time on it. I do not need that for the time being anyway.
Also I have heard rumors that the incoming Skype calls cause the regular phone line to drop if you are on the phone but I have not been able to test that either.
As an overall summary, I would say I am satisfied by this product given it costs much less than its competitors, and I know the company is releasing updated drivers from time to time. It does what I expect it to do. Nothing more nothing less.
I hope this review is helpful for you. Let me know if you have any additional questions.
Comments»
Hi Orhan,
I have the same kmu-30a device. However, the computer I had it hooked up to crashed. And, I lost my original driver disk. Would you be able to send me its driver setup? Your help will be very much appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Joseph
Joseph, check out http://www.k-mate.com/voip/download.asp
Good luck.