Google Voice updates (again)
Google has been kind enough to fix another of my gripes about their Voice service, or at least get to a nice middle point. Although you still can’t use your current phone number for the full Google Voice package, you can have Google Voice handle all your voicemails. It’s a lot more useful to have all your voicemails in one place with transcripts, though you can’t set up forwarding, screening, or record your calls. Still, it does mean that you still get to use all your free mobile-to-mobile minutes and you don’t have to worry about lag time because of calls running through Google’s servers, so it’s a nice halfway point. To really be useful, though, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got a plan with plenty of text messages so that you can actually see on your phone when you have a new voicemail. You may also want to change your voicemail entry in your contact list so that it calls your Google Voice number instead of your regular voicemail as Google’s service doesn’t actually take its place (in the sense that your provider’s service still exists, but none of your voicemails will go to it).
The downside is that it isn’t quite as convenient to get a text message telling you about voicemail as it is to just have your voicemail icon light up, but you do get a transcript out of it and you can listen to it online, so… decide for yourself, I guess.