The ONLY downside right now is dailing unfamiliar numbers on the phone from within GV, to get the no-minutes-charged option. Newer phones that let one view contacts and then dial fix that issue (our old Motorola RAZR’s don’t do that).
The phone service providers are trying to somehow legally BAN or stop GV. Since they are not making much progress (Kind of like Radio companies trying to ban or block TV companies- AS IF!) they have implemented some new nasty policies: if you change anything about your service you are considered violating the original contract and you get the cancellation fees. Also T-Mobile has stopped offering “My Faves” as this is the only way they can legally limit somehow customer access to something like GV. We’re going to cancel our whole family plan after the holidays and sign up with WHATEVER phone company offers us basic 3-4 regular numbers with no charge to those numbers.

When the phone majors eventually collapse to 1/10 of what they were, the new wifi phones will still make GV possible. We don’t need wifi in the car on the freeway, and one can get 911 on a non-activated phone anyway in the case of an emergency. Everywhere else in a major metropolis we’re able to get free internet access (in our case) via wifi spots, which with our wifi phones and GV voice, means we’ve got free unlimited cell phone service and access, all tied in with our own unified numbers and answering services and emails.

I think it’s a revolution. As a techie, it will radically change the phone-service landscape permanently in the next few years, and maybe even finally destroy the phone company monopolies. (Even your land line won’t need access anymore, just internet access soon).

GV will work with the phone manufacturers to
1) Increase range of wifi in phones
2) Access contacts to dail from within a call
3) set phones up to work without SIM cards as a normal feature (just a memory card for contacts)…

Try it out!!!

Thanks for an excellent article on the pros and cons of Google Voice. I’m in the online phone business myself and we are all watching GV very carefully as they have the potential to eat our lunch! Some will be in trouble (e.g. SpinVox and PhoneTag sell voicemail transcription for a fee – that’s dead), others will survive by focusing on different niches. My company Toktumi may be of interest to some of your readers if they contemplate using GV for a business.

Okay here comes the shameless promotion but I wanted to share this with your readers as I thought some might find it helpful – particularly those that have decided to strike out on their own and run their own business.

Toktumi is like a professional-grade version of Google Voice, designed for businesses that don’t want to trust their calls to a free service, who need service level guarantees and live customer support. In additional to GV-like features, we offer business features like auto-attendant, 800 numbers, a PC softphone, fax, desktop sharing, and a new mobile app called Line2 launching on the iPhone in a few weeks, similar to GV Mobile.

There’s a free 30 day trial available at the toktumi website if people want to check us out.

The issue I have with Google Voice is there can’t be multiple extensions associated with the account so for a small business there is no option for pick ext. 1 for Joe, 2 for Amy, etc. There are two of us at my office and we need our own voicemails. Am I missing something or am I correct on my assumption?

I’m looking into Toktumi, http://www.toktumi.com/WhyToktumi.aspx

I haven’t spoken with anyone that has used them but the feature set looks great on paper. Anyone have any experience with them? I’m thinking of giving them a try but I’d like to hear some feedback before I go down the number porting path. Thanks.

http://skydeck.com/blog/announcements/google-voice-mashup

Skydeck addresses some of the biggest problems that you bring up. You don’t need to change your number and you don’t need to change the way you make phone calls. Right now we support Blackberry, Android, and Windows Mobile phones.

Best
Jason

Success path for me: put GV on do not disturb. Changed cell phone voice mail to point to GV rather than carrier’s voice mail. Cell phone voice mails go to GV, get transcribed and sent to email account. Pretty good tool at this point. I now use it daily. Maybe less use than Google hoped, but perfect for me.