liGo Bluewave Review – Make and receive mobile calls, with your normal phone

This box can be a little tricky to explain, but I’ll try my best. It lets you make and receive calls through your mobile phone or phones with any standard home phone.

In the most simple setup you merely need to plug your corded or cordless home phone in, pair up your mobile (via Bluetooth) and all your calls will go through your mobile. Don’t fret though, you can still put your normal home phone line in and calls will instead route through that line as default instead.

So, if you choose to plug your landline in, calls will go through that as default. If you don’t, calls go through the first mobile you pair up.

This then leads us onto the first plus point of this device. If you have a mobile phone with lots of inclusive calls, you need only pair this mobile to the liGo Bluewave. With the box connected to your landline, you only need pick “1” before dialing and your expensive calls suddenly become cheaper.

But wait, I’m perhaps getting ahead of myself. Just how do we set this up? Well, it’s not all that difficult if I’m honest. On the side there’s two RJ11 ports and, in the box, there’s an RJ11 cable. You simply need to remove the RJ11 cable from the underside of your home phone (this is the one coming from your normal wall socket), plug it into the bottom socket, then put the supplied RJ11 cable between the top port and your home phone.

This basically creates a “daisy chain” setup. Calls coming into your landline bounce through the liGo Bluewave but everything works as normal. Calls going out through your home phone still go through the same line as default if you plug it together this way.

Next, pick up the phone you’d like to pair. The liGo Bluewave operates by making the call over Bluetooth in a similar way that your car hands-free system does. You can do this with three different mobile handsets, so you just need to pair them up. It’s just a matter of pressing and holding the appropriate blue button on the top. As I mentioned before, you can connect a mobile with lots of free “talk minutes” or, heaven forbid, your work mobile if you wish.

For those using a mobile quite often in the office or at home then changing to a corded handset could have health benefits too, and this will help you to make those mobile calls without having to have a mobile planted to your ear all the time.

To make a mobile call with your normal home handset in this configuration, pick up the phone and you’ll get your normal dial-tone. Next press “1”, “2” or “3” depending on which mobile you want to use, followed by the “Recall” or “R” button This is all something you can add into the number memory of your normal handset by the way. Then it’s just a matter of sticking the mobile number in you want to call and away it goes.

In reverse, when a call comes in on any one of your mobile handsets, the base station / DECT phone will ring, as will all other DECT phones in your house. This is particularly useful if you’ve got a few mobile handsets that you have to carry around with you. Oh, and when a call does come in it’ll show the number and the line on your DECT handset.

If none of this has made sense, don’t worry, there’s a video showing it in action 🙂

Conclusion

There’s several plus points to this box. For starters, if you program your speed-dial numbers on your regular DECT phone, it’ll save you a truck-load of cash when calling mobile handsets from your home (or business) landline phone. The Bluewave of course doesn’t actually need a landline to work, so provided you don’t mind broadcasting your mobile number, you can cancel your landline completely and just use this.

Coverage is something else I’ve not mentioned. If you’ve moved into a new office or house and found that there’s no signal, just put your mobile handset near to the window, pair it up and boom – you can suddenly use your mobile phone via the Bluewave. Also it means you can walk around your home or office without having to worry about the signal dropping, especially if you connect a DECT handset.

Likewise, if you have a big house, this could be a great alternative to having to run around and find your mobile. With DECT handsets connected to a base you can have one in the kitchen, bedrooms etc – then you’re always near your mobile, even when you’re not.

For me it was the fact that I could make cheaper calls, and the fact that – if you have multiple mobile handsets – you can make and receive calls from one without having to hunt around for the phone. I even found that I could leave my work phone in the car and calls would still come through my home phone.

If you’re interested, take a look at liGo.com or buy one for (current price) £99.99.