A Brief Review of Google Voice
I ported my number from AT&T to Google Voice a month and a half ago. It has its benefits and its detractions, but on the whole I’m keeping it for now and not porting back, partially because it’s Good Enough, and partially because I’m tired of dealing with billing departments and three-day SMS outages.
Having your primary number with Google Voice is great, because it means everything you do on your phone can be done on voice.google.com: place an outgoing call (ring a phone or use voice chat on Google Talk), send and read SMS, listen to voicemails. I had Google Voice as my voicemail service for over a year, and while that was nice, this is a whole lot nicer. And, anything you can do on the site, you can do in the official Google Voice iPhone app (or any of the third-party apps; I use GV Connect because it has the least braindead, modally-blocking UI of what’s currently out).
However, this means anything you do on your phone while out and about, like placing a call or SMSing a friend you haven’t talked to in a while, now require data to work. (There’s ways around this, but they’re incomplete.) Let me reword the above sentence to describe my situation: Google Voice can suck in San Francisco, especially in areas with no or slow data coverage from AT&T.
There are ways around this, but workarounds is another way of saying “they blew it”. You can call your Google Voice number (not unlike calling yourself to listen to voicemails in the days before Visual Voicemail), and then place an outgoing call to another phone number. Google Voice iPhone apps have an “offline mode” that dials your phone number, steps through the menus, and then dials the number straight from your Google address book.
Oh, did I mention, you’ll need to sync your contacts from MobileMe or your phone to Google to have an address book? (I already had this turned on and it’d been working flawlessly for months (more than I can say for MobileMe), but it’s worth mentioning.)
For bridging SMS, Google Voice does support SMS forwarding, wherein your phone receives a text message from a random phone number in DC or Seattle or Omaha or wherever which contains the name of your contact and their SMS. You can reply to this from your phone and your contact will receive the text, so this can be thought of as a data-free offline mode for SMS. But if you need to text someone whom you have no SMS bridge phone number for, you’re screwed and need to pull up the Google Voice app to start the conversation.
Incoming phone calls look like they come from the caller’s phone number (since you can spoof caller ID), but you can optionally enable call screening to send a caller to voicemail (and listen in while they leave it) or answer the call.
The port process is easy to start, but very disappointing. You enter your phone number and carrier account number on the Google Voice site, pay $20 bucks for processing, and wait. Any text messages sent to you between when the port begins and ends are lost forever. You’ll be without SMS for “up to” three days (mine was out for almost four). You’ll still need a paid phone plan with SMS and phone service, so you can use those in the interim, but be prepared to talk to basically no one while the port is ongoing. (I’m lucky that I email and DM so many people, and I was glad that I started the port on a Monday.)
A carrier-side Google Voice-aware routing setup would be a huge improvement over the current implementation (and Sprint is currently working on one). Since SMS doesn’t allow spoofing the sender or receiver, your carrier, in conjunction with Google Voice, is well-positioned to seamlessly handle SMS translation and make it look “normal” on your phone’s end without the recipient knowing the message has been routed through two different phone numbers. If AT&T or Verizon supported Google Voice, they could even do Visual Voicemail plus transcripts on your iPhone… if Apple went along with it. (Don’t hold your breath.)
In a day and age where APIs and third-party clients and packets rule the land, the phone system’s archaic systems of interaction and lack of replaceable routing intermediaries makes Google Voice only middlingly useful. It’s a system that’s been glued on top of existing infrastructure, and the leaky abstractions consequences that follow are obvious and sometimes painful.
