Brighthouse Easy Gadget review

The local large cable company here in Tampa Bay Florida is Brighthouse Networks; the only services I subscribe to from them are Internet and home phone (digital land line).

Last year I remembered seeing in the voice mail system that they were working on a "feature" that allowed your voice mails to be sent to email. Well, that never happened (or if it's there I couldn't find it), but they did introduce something called Easy Gadget for the digital home phone service.

Here's my review of it.

Installation

Not EASY at all. In fact it's ridiculously difficult.

All the instructions on how to install and use it are here. It is so unbelievably long that it's amazing anyone could get through it all. I didn't bother reading it. I just downloaded, installed and went from there.

Easy Gadget requires Adobe AIR. That's a strike right there because it should just be a standalone program that doesn't require a specific platform.

The software requires a Brighthouse account in order for it to work. Is it the same as your billing username/password? Of course not. You need a completely separate one just to use this thing. I'm not even going to talk about that process because that's also a huge pain to get working.

Once you've jumped though 5 or 7 OK, INSTALL, OK, YES, NO, MAYBE, OK, INSTALL crapola screens (and I'm not exaggerating there), once running it runs like it's supposed to.

Using Easy Gadget

This thing is simple enough and it works fine except for one huge, huge, huge flaw.

You can't select your own ringtones.

This absolutely boggles the mind why they would program it like that. Here I have a PC with Windows. I can use any damn sound I want for anything I want - but not in this AIR app.

Brighthouse, seriously.. just.. seriously.. did you consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, people just MIGHT think the built-in ringtones SUCK?

Sigh..

I fished out the directory where all the built-in MP3 ringtones are. Dropping your own MP3 file in there doesn't work, nor does renaming an existing ringtone and substituting it with another file work (it breaks the program).

In the oh-so crappy documentation for the program, it says if you click the Brighthouse logo, it takes you to a help page if you want more info. That doesn't work. All it does is bring you to the default home page for Brighthouse Networks.

SERIOUSLY, Brighthouse?

I swear, I'm going to find a way to get a custom ringtone in this stupid app.

Anyway, aside from lack of a FEATURE THAT SHOULD BE THERE, it works pretty good. When a call comes in, a toaster pop-up appears with the Caller ID info.

I dig the Contacts feature and that I can set certain contacts to "Silence" for a ringtone for people I don't want to talk to. 🙂

I seriously dig the fact I can access all my voicemail right from within the app without picking up the phone.

I also seriously dig the "Recents" that shows all the last calls.

For a digital home phone, this is pretty nifty.

However it would be a million times better if I could choose MY OWN RINGTONE.