Yesterday, our Ooma Hub and Scout package arrived just three business days after purchasing (not bad for Amazon’s free super-saver shipping).

Opening the box was reminiscent of opening an Apple product. Those who own Mac’s and other Apple products will know what I mean. Most manufacturers simply see packaging as as way to get products safely into the hands of consumers. Apple, and apparently Ooma too, design their packaging to almost present their products. It’s quite fancy, simple and downright elegant.

But who cares about packaging of the product sucks?

Fortunately, the product itself could easily be confused for an Apple product. It’s design engineers appear to have taken some cues from Apple’s design team. These devices are simple, highly intuitive, easy to use, tidy and clean. Even the colors of white and silver are Apple-like. As a Mac family, we like this of course.

So, we opened it up, found it very easy to understand with a quick start guide and a more detailed users guide. Very few parts in the Ooma Hub. The Hub, the power cord, a phone cord, a network cord. There was also an optional phone line splitter. Before we began installing any hardware, we registered the product which only took a few minutes. The only downside of that process was the lack of available numbers in our calling area, but that’s okay since we’re porting our old home number (more on that another time).

Setting up the hardware was easy. We made it a bit harder because we wanted the device somewhere else in our house and Ooma insists on sitting between your modem and the rest of your network. Some might find this to be irritating, but their reason is to make sure they can prioritize web traffic so that calls don’t suffer should you be heavily using your bandwidth. This setup wasn’t complex because of Ooma, but because of our home network setup. Regardless, we got it setup in no time. From box arriving to installation was 45 minutes to an hour – most of which was spent re-arranging things to where we wanted them.

Once we got things setup, we went ahead and signed up for Ooma’s Premier service. The $99 annual price also included the phone porting which is typically a one-time fee of $39.99. We’re glad we signed up for this. It gives us all sorts of cool features:

1. Additional phone on-demand phone line – if someone is on the phone, you can just pick up another handset and make a call.
2. Conference/Party Line
3. Additional Phone Number anywhere in the US. In our case, we got one in our out-of-town family’s hometown so they could call us without long distance charges
4. Personal Blacklist (optional) – we can permanently block calls to any number we choose, so when those telemarketers refuse to stop calling, we can just block em’
5. Community Blacklist (optional) – when enough ooma users vote on blocking certain numbers, they’ll automatically be blocked from calling those who subscribe.
6. Call Forwarding/Mult-ring – set your phone to forward to your cell phone or also ring your cell phone

These are all in addition to some seriously cool included features that combine the best of many worlds together. The Ooma hub is sort of like an answering machine combined with telco-provided voicemail, yet with a web interface. There’s so many ways to access your messages. Some of the other features we really dig are the do not disturb feature, call screening, custom rings for different r or people, etc.

The voice quality has been fantastic. Should it suffer, one can connect to the Ooma hub with a standard network cable and type http://setup.ooma.com into their web browser where they’ll be directed to the settings for their hub. This is only accessible when plugged directly into the hub! From here, one can increase the allotted bandwidth set aside for calls which should preserve good quality for those who have high bandwidth uses otherwise.

All told, we’re pretty impressed with this product. First it was the savings on the phone bill, now it’s the usefulness and design of the product.