Today I made a big commitment to one companion and pushed another further away, though not entirely.
I emailed a large number of friends and family with my Google Voice number and asked them to update their address books with it. Until now I've only given it to people I text with often, placing the burden on them to keep track of both numbers, but now I'm taking a few more eggs out of AT&T's basket and putting them into Google's.
Texting has become a big part of my life over the past year or so. I was late to the game compared to the younger generation, but paying for every message seemed silly, so I made due with IM and email. When I bought my first iPhone my there were 200 text messages included in my plan, so I started to use it a little more.
Then when iOS 3 was released in 2009 and I had push messaging, I installed Textfree on both Becky and my iPhones and we began texting each other several times a day. I tried to get others I knew with iPhones to install the app, but it was a pain to setup and only worked with other people on Textfree, so I kept my 200 text message plan to use with everyone else.
Then in September Apple relaxed its ban against Google Voice apps in the App Store so I began using it for text messaging instead. We had already increased Becky's text message limit to 1500 so I could use GV to communicate with her, and eventually I started using it with others.
The experience thus far hasn't been perfect. The first version of Google's official app was terribly slow and buggy in its first release while the third party apps were much better but didn't give me push messaging. Now Google has updated their app to 1.1, which is a major improvement.
Beyond the iPhone app it's really nice to be able to send and receive text messages using my two full hands instead of just my thumbs through GV's browser interface. I can even send and receive phone calls from a computer, so I can have long conversations at work without using up daytime minutes.
Last but not least, I can make calls from my iPhone over wifi, which is nice because even though I've lived in a high density neighborhood for five years, my cell reception still sucks!
Getting the people I communicate with to switch to my new cloud-based number is the first step in my plan to eventually drop my cell phone carrier entirely. I'm hoping within two years to trade in my iPhone for an iPod touch and a mobile wifi access point. Not only will this save me a ton of money over time, it moves the carrier into the only roll it is any good at, providing bandwidth... though even that point is debatable.
2 comments:
Hi Brett,
Thanks for reviewing Google Voice for me (for us), I've had my eye on it but keep stalling, not wanting to climb the learning curve you climbed. Based on your recommendation, when I have some app-tinkering time (over the holiday season?) I'll definitely give it a spin. How does the VOIP compare with, say Skype over WiFI, have you made the comparison? I used Skype for a while last year then stopped after a couple of bad experiences.
Say, regarding your last point, the carriers don't like being called "dumb bandwidth" (I believe that's the phrase I heard a Sprint VP use last week) for a couple of reasons. First, it's hard work being...dumb bandwidth (granted...although still a commodity, sadly for them). Second, they currently "own" the relationships with customers, which relationships they feel they manage well and to the benefit of both customers and 3rd party app providers, etc. (think about all of the phones that get updated via the carrier instead of via iTunes, for example). Which brings us to your point about an iPod touch: maybe some folks want (or need) to be "managed", but that number would seem to be shrinking rapidly.
The VOIP seems to work well. On my PC I have to tweak the settings in Gmail to get it to use the right microphone and speakers but on my Mac everything just works. I use Talkatone on my iPhone for placing calls on wifi, I haven't been brave enough to try it on 3G. The GV app doesn't place VOIP calls but makes placing calls from your cell line pretty seamless.
Those who are not technically included will take some time to understand sending and receiving phone calls from GV, particularly since it needs to jump from the GV app to the iPhone's dialer. However I did set up an account for my six year old and she uses it for texting from her iPod.
The carriers are major bureaucracies and I don't trust them to be innovative, especially not in ways that might hurt an existing revenue stream. Google is (for now) very innovative and doesn't have an established business model to protect.
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