Google Voice – Hands On First Impressions
I’ve had a chance to use Google Voice for a while now, but haven’t made it a priority. I wanted to slowly let it’s usefulness work into my means of communications, and here are some of the early impressions of what I’ve found so far.
Let me start off by saying that I use an iPhone as my main mode of communication. I also have a Blackberry for work, and a land line at home. After configuring Google Voice through the site, I felt I had a good setup for initial testing, with main use going through my iPhone.
The biggest problem with this is that the GV App was not approved by Apple’s App Store. This is actually a very big deal.
When sending a text through the browser interface, you have no record of it if you’re offline. For example, if I sent a text to someone through my PC browser, and they respond, I will receive it on my iPhone’s text application, but I don’t see the text that I sent. If I go into the Safari Browser, I can see both the sent and received messages, but this is not optimal. On the Blackberry App, you can see both sent and received messages, which makes sense, but without an actual app on the iPhone, text messaging seems goofy.
While we’re talking about the iPhone interface, you can use their mobile browser version of Google Voice, but it’s very limited. To the point that I have no desire to use it. In order for this to be successful, it’s got to be intuitive and provide a SIGNIFICANT reason for users to make a switch. So far, that’s not the case.
The Blackberry App is probably more limited than the mobile browser version. Making it almost useless as well.
The funky thing about Google Voice, is that when you want to initiate a call from your phone, it first calls you, and when you pick up, it initiates the call that way. This can be a bit confusing at first.
I’m not sure what went wrong, but when I had Matt call my GV number, my phone never rang, I just had a message. It was translated for me and was mostly correct, but it did mess up a few words to the point that the last sentence made no sense at all.
The ability to log all calls and texts is an interesting feature to me, so I will keep an eye on this thing for improvements over time.
Overall, I would suggest that if you can still get an invite and reserve a phone number, do so. But don’t make a mad rush to start using the service until they get more of the kinks worked out, and a better delivery system. I definitely think this has potential, but for now, it’s just a novelty and a watered down version of Skype.
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