Google Voice and mobile phones.. am I missing something?
Google Voice
So everyone is a twitter about Google Voice and using the service for all sorts of things. Having it call you and call a contact to make a “free” call. I’m an AT&T wireless customer and do not have a home land line, I don’t see how I can benefit from using google voice to make calls for me. Let me explain:
My AT&T plan gives me X minutes of talk time per month and “unlimited” talk time after a certain time and weekends. When I call a friend using google voice it calls me then calls them and we can talk. By doing so it’s eating up minutes on my phone since AT&T doesn’t provide free incoming calls (unless something changed I don’t know about). Lets say I use the GV method and call a fellow AT&T customer, now I’m really screwing myself since we both have AT&T and we’re not using our unlimited mobile to mobile talk time.
The only benefit I see here is that if you’re calling someone from a land line and want your GV number to show up on caller ID then you’ll be able to do so for free. Outside of that your paying for hiding behind your google voice caller id?
Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments please.
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About Me
Jason Tucker - Southern California native, Systems Administrator, Podcaster, Wordpress hacker and Social media guy.
I use my Google Voice number on my cell to create a second phone number and thus separate my personal calls from my business calls. I configured GV to show my GV number on the caller ID. So when I get a call from my GV number, I answer with the business name. The disadvantage is that I have to go to the web interface to see the number of the caller.
The other advantage is that if people are calling your GV number, you dont have to worry about porting your ATT number if you decide to change carriers in the future.
If you only have the one number, I don’t see a huge advantage to GV yet.
I guess the big problem I have with this is when you’re on a cellphone and your calling someone or some one is calling you and you’re both on the same carrier you both lose out on the m2m calling feature.
Another feature of GV is from SMS messages which is nice. Otherwise, I use it like Mark. Getting the transcribed voice mail messages via text or email, plus having them logged in a gmail type interface, is very handy.
Also helps that I can use the GV app on my Blackberry.
If you make long distance calls, they also have some great rates. Not as good as Skype-to-Go, but pretty good.
This is why google voice is a big deal. I currently have the Fring app installed on my iPhone and have a google voice number as well as a Gizmo Project SIP number. I’ve put them all in such that whenever i get a call on my google voice number it calls my gizmo number which has free incoming calls. That then calls my fring application which then allows me to answer the call on my phone. Without having jailbroken my phone, this allows me to have unlimited free calling as long as i am in a wifi zone. If i did jailbreak my phone then i could download an app that tricks other apps to always thinking it is on wifi. This would then allow me free calling anywhere anytime.