Nerd Heaven
I just got an invited to join Google Voice. This is a really awesome looking service. In about 5 minutes I had a phone number in my area code picked out that would be my one number. I then added phones I had that I wanted this number to ring. The account gives me web access to voice mail (both a sound file and a written transcript) and text messages. It also gives me free long distance calling any where in the US, all for $0 a month. Lots of other features like customized greetings and call forwarding that depends on the caller which I have not played with yet. Pretty cool. If you get an invite, I would grab your number.
Aaron C. de Bruyn:
I've had it for about a year.
Maybe once a month I get a garbled call transferred to my phone or it totally fails to ring one of the numbers I've put in. Also voicemail translation is a bit quirky, but you can usually get the gist of the message.
Even with those minor issues, it still rocks.
July 8, 2009, 9:31 pmmjh:
I recently got my invite, too. So far, I like it. But I think that it's going to be less useful than I'd hoped. Making outbound calls that show up from my google number is straight forward but tedious.
1) dial your gvoice # from one of your phones
2) give your pin
3) press 2
4) dial the number you actually want to call
Which is fine if you know the number of who you want to call. But pretty inconvenient when you just want to go to your cell phone's contact list and call one of their numbers w/out having to remember it.
As a result it changes behavior a bit. People call me on one number but I call back on a different one. Same is true for SMS.
But like I said, I haven't had it long. Maybe I'll find some other way of making outbound calls that's easier. I know that there are cell phone dialers, but the ones I've seen don't work for my current phone (Palm Pre) nor my old phone (Palm Centro).
July 9, 2009, 12:34 pm