Nick Glover

So I see on Gizmodo that Google Voice has finally managed to give us free calling to Alaska and Hawaii, eliminating one of my gripes about it. Hooray! Now let’s just hope they’re still hard at work on the other problems…

I was invited to join Google Voice (GV) a couple days ago, so I thought I’d share my reactions to it so far. I’ll admit that I don’t use it very often (or at all, really), but there are a couple of problems I have noticed in my limited usage.

• You can’t use your existing number. Everyone knows that already and Google is said to be working on it. The biggest problem with a new number is not just that you have to tell everyone about it, but also that no one gets free calling or texts with you. Most of the people I call and text are on the same network, and while it’s not a big problem for me (I don’t talk much and I have unlimited texting), I imagine it might be a bigger problem for others, including my friends who text me and don’t have unlimited texting outside of our shared network. If/when they figure out number porting, that would solve that problem as well as the problem of having weird numbers to send texts to and the extra steps associated with dialing.
• No voice recognition for dialing. It’s one thing to have to dial in to your number to call someone else using it, but it’s another to have to actually enter in the number. I imagine that a lot of people these days are like me and don’t bother to memorize phone numbers, so that’s a problem that could easily be solved by Google’s voice recognition software they already use for Goog-411.
• When you receive a text, it starts with the contact’s full name so that you know who it’s from (because otherwise, they are given a weird number you won’t recognize). It would be nice if Google Contacts would let you specify a nickname for each of your contacts so that you don’t waste valuable text characters (because if it’s a longer text, it’ll probably spill over to a second text) on a contact’s full name. I suppose you could just remove last names from all your contacts, but that seems counter productive.
• Texts are left as “unread” in your online inbox even after you have read them on your phone. I know there is a way for phones to communicate with one another as to whether or not a text has actually been opened, so I hope there is a way for Google to integrate that into their system.
• Domestic long distance isn’t free. Most mobile providers include domestic long distance, but Google charges for calls to Alaska and Hawaii. Come on, Google. Easy fix.

Again, I haven’t used it too much, but I’m pretty sure those are issues without real solutions at the present, at least not for those of us with “dumb” phones.