MaxMobile iPhone / Blackberry App

[bjitima]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if anyone here had tried out the MaxMobile app for the iPhone and BlackBerry. If so, what did you think of it? Did you find it easy to set up / configure? Did it work the way you thought it would?

We got a 5 user license installed today and I found it a bit more complicated to set up than what I thought it would be. The Help files in MaxAdministrator were very helpful, though.

It does not work the way I thought it would. I may have it configured incorrectly...I am waiting on my dealer to get more info from AltiGen. I thought it would work just like setting up MaxCommunicator with IPTalk softphone enabled. Instead, when I place a call through MaxMobile, it dials an office phone number from my cellphone, and then seizes another office line to make an outgoing call. It ends up using two metered lines through the office as well as the cell phone line, so I end up getting billed three times the minutes. For people calling my extension, it again seizes an outside line and calls my cell phone, showing the office line phone number on my cell phone's caller ID. I then have to minimize the call and go back to the MaxMobile app (it is automatically minimized when someone calls my extension) and then I can see the caller ID through the app.

It took me a little bit of poking around to figure out how to find the BLF. I thought it would show up through the Extension list in the Directory, but you have to add the extensions that you want to be able to see to your Favorites list, at which point you can then see the BLF.

I have also noticed that several outside calls have problems hearing me and vice versa. That is something else that my dealer is supposed to look into when he speaks with AltiGen for me. I have always had the same problem in the past when I use call forwarding. If I set my extension to forward to an outside line, I have always had volume issues.

The few reviews on the iPhone app store for MaxMobile were great, so I'm really hoping that my problems will be easily solved with a couple of settings changes.

I will post updates as I get to play with the app a little more and after I have heard back from my dealer. In the meantime, has anyone else had any experiences with MaxMobile? I'd like to hear any good reviews, both good or bad (preferably more good!)

Ben

 

[bjitima]

I found a MaxMobile user guide for iPhone that looks like it does in fact always use a phone line as the voice connection to your phone (although from the Droid user guide, it is much less clear as to whether they do it the same or not).

I've made and received a handful of calls with it so far today. I haven't had much trouble hearing the other calls so far, but every one of them as of yet has had problems hearing me. This has ranged from "I had to take you off speaker phone and it is still a little low, but I can hear you well enough" to "I had to go into a really quiet room because there is no way I could have a conversation with even a small amount of background noise."

One weird quirk that I have noticed is that every time I have received an incoming call from our phone system, it has changed my audio source away from my Bluetooth headset to my iPhone handset. I change back and it works fine.

 

[bjitima]

I had my questions answered, although none of them were really the answers that I was hoping for.

For the MaxMobile using two lines at the office as well as cell phone minutes, this is the case and there is currently no alternative. AltiGen said that they have a SIP version of MaxMobile in the works, but no definitive date. I was told that the end of next quarter had been loosely tossed around as a goal to have this working, but as of yet there was nothing final.

The problem with the volume was also something that we were told could not be solved. We have what Verizon calls a FlexGrow T1 that is split into analog channels from their equipment, and then from there either goes to one of a handful of analog devices that we use or to an Ortronix patch panel which connects to our AltiGen server. We were told that when they use both lines, there is too much DB loss with analog which causes the lack of volume. They said that we could have the line signal boosted which would solve it, but would in turn cause normal calls to be far too loud. So the only real way to get good volume would be to talk to Verizon about having our lines given to us digitally and then we would have to buy a new riser card for the AltiGen server (which I think usually ends up running in the neighborhood of $2500 not counting any kind of trade in value for the old card.)

MaxMobile has a neat interface and has potential to be really great, but as it is right now, I don't know how much real use we will get out of it. Hopefully it will improve significantly with future releases.