Finding Value in Google Voice

I've had a Google Voice number for a few years now; as soon as I heard about it I signed up and waited patiently for my invitation.  However, as feature-rich as the service is, I never did switch over to using it as my primary number for a couple of reasons.

First of all, when I started using Google Voice I had issues with call quality.  It reminded me of the initial VOIP services (I was an early adopter of that too) in that it was plagued with static and some echo issues.  I use my phone a lot for business and it wasn't of a quality I could rely on.

Even if the call quality had been excellent - and at this point it may well be - I still couldn't use Google Voice as my primary number because of my plan minutes.  I believe every major carrier offers free mobile to mobile to other callers on the same network - Sprint even offers free mobile calls to ANY other mobile number.  However, when you use Google Voice your call is routed through a Google Voice number and this means that every minute of every call you make counts against your plan minutes during daytime hours.  I've always tried to keep my minutes as low as possible to save on my monthly fee so this isn't something I'm willing to overlook.

Here's a description of how Google Voice makes a domestic call for you straight from the Help section of the site:

Each time you place a call, instead of dialing the number you want to reach, Google Voice dials a US-based direct access number. The Google Voice server then forwards your call to the actual destination number. This allows for faster call setup and the ability to place calls without a data connection. These direct access numbers may show in your phone's call log, or on your phone bill.
A unique direct access phone number is assigned to each person that you call. The direct access numbers are stored in the Google Voice application, not in your Contacts. They can be purged from your phone at any time by signing out of the Google Voice app.
Note: Direct access numbers are assigned randomly, and may include numbers that are out of your local calling area, or even out of state. If you don't have a nationwide calling plan, you may be charged long distance rates by your carrier.

Searching the internet a bit you can find some creative attempts to 'game' the system by adding the Google Voice numbers to your friends and family plan and forwarding calls, but it was a bit more than I was willing to go through and I never had a high level of confidence in any of the methods outlined.

However Google Voice and Google Voice Lite do offer at least one great feature that I've cannot now live without: visual voicemail.

Nothing used to drive me nuts more than sitting through one voicemail after another on Verizon, who wouldn't let you delete a message until you'd heard the entire thing (and of course you were using minutes while listening).  In fact, I don't want to listen through my voicemails at all - most of the time I just call the person back if I want to speak with them or ignore them if I don't.  In other words, I think some genius designed visual voicemail specifically for me.

Problem is, Verizon wants to charge $3 a month for this feature.  This is so absurd I'm not even going to go into it - suffice it to say as much as I love visual voicemail I'm not paying extra for it - our wireless bill is already north of $200 a month.

This is where Google Voice rides in on a white steed to save the day.  With my Android phone (the Droid Razr) I can simply configure Google Voice to be my voicemail for my existing number.  I don't have to give anyone my Google Voice number and they have no idea it routed to my Google Voice voicemail.  Unbelievable.  I have no idea how this works but I think it's cool as hell.  It's highly configurable and works great.  I can choose to get a status bar notification, email, and/or text when you miss a call or receive a new voicemail.  Additionally, I have a Google Voice extension in my browser (Chrome) to alert me if I have any new messages or missed calls.  Furthermore I can send text messages if the mood strikes me - and let's not forget the website has all these features and more.

The only glitch I encountered - and I set this up on three different phones - was the final step in the process of setting up Google Voice on the phone.  It just sat there working for minutes, I don't know how long it took to finish the process but it happened all three times.  Nonetheless all phones have Google Voice up and running as voicemail so don't worry if you experience this glitch.

I should also add Google Voice gives tremendously flexibility for voicemail messages, you can sort your contacts into groups and have a different greeting for each group, for instance.  I won't go into all the features but it's got everything I could imagine.

We set up my wife on Google Voice Lite.  As the name implies, this is a limited feature version which doesn't actually provide her with a Google Voice number.  It simply sets up voicemail for her, and she also uses it to make international calls at competitive rates.  Because we use Android phones, she can direct dial internationally and Google Voice will automatically be used to make the call.  For anyone else you have to do a little extra work by calling your own personal access number and then the international number you want to call.  Cost is handled by buying credits on the Google Voice account and these can be automatically reloaded at a level you determine, or you can manually pay as you go.

Google Voice has a great feature set and is the best visual voicemail I've used - and best of all it's free.  If you're interested it's now open to anyone, you can get on board here.

A week with the Droid Razr

I've had the Droid Razr for a full week now so I think that's enough time to share my thoughts.  I don't like reviews written a day or two after someone has started using a device - that's just not enough time to get an accurate impression.

Initially I fully intended to wait for the Galaxy Nexus; as I use the Razr I'm constantly comparing it to what I hear about the Nexus.  I did like the Razr very much and when Amazon offered the phone at one penny for new activations (we switched to Verizon from Sprint) I went ahead.  AmazonWireless has the best deals on smart phones I've found, and I have 30 days to exchange the phone for another model if I'm not happy with it so I had nothing to lose by 'test-driving' the Razr.

Now on to the phone!

From the packaging to the power cable to the Razr hardware itself, everything feels sleek and durable.  I'm not going to pretend I'm an engineer, but the impression is that this device is constructed of the highest quality materials and it gives me a feeling that I'll never have to worry about hardware problems.  As light as it is, the Razr still feels tough as nails.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think this phone is 'sexy' - if that's possible for a bit of plastic, glass, and metal.  I love the design.  It is a bit wide, and I find that I've adjusted the way I hold the phone slightly to compensate.  I'm a male with medium to smaller hands and my wife is tiny and I've heard no complaints from her, but if you're considering this phone you might want to test drive it in the store before ordering.

In order to make the phone as thin as it is Motorola made the phone wider and longer than the screen relative to most phones we're seeing now where the bezel is very close to the screen edge.  I don't find this to be an issue and the appearance is quite 'normal' looking.  The phone does have the four Android buttons (capacitive touch) on the bottom for Menu, Home, Back, and Search.  This has been the standard for all Android phones but will go the way of the Dodo with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android OS 4.0), where these options are part of the OS.  Personally, I like having the static buttons on the bottom of the phone.

Additionally, the phone is thicker just at the top, where Motorola chose to put the headphone jack, rear camera and the micro-usb and hdmi ports.  This actually helps me to pull the phone out of my pocket so I like it.  The power button and volume rocker are on the right side as you look down at the face of the phone, and there is a flip door on the left for the sim and microsd cards.

In case you aren't familiar with them, here are a list of the more important specs (credit to hexus.net) on the phone:

The specs

• 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Advanced qHD touchscreen display
• scratch-resistant corning Gorilla Glass
• 7.1mm profile – the world’s thinnest smartphone
• precision machined stainless steel core
• laminated construction for enhanced rigidity
• Kevlar back coating
• Motorola Splash Guard nanotechnology (water-proof capabilities)v • Dual-core 1.2GHz processor
• 1GB of RAM
• 8-megapixel camera with 1,080p HD Video recording support
• Battery: 12.5 hours talk time, 8.9 hours of video playback
• webtop technology
• Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
• Moto Cast – personal cloud support
• Enterprise features: Citix Receiver, GoToMeeting, Videoconference with HD webcam
• Business Ready: Corporate email access, Corporate calendar and addresses, Microsoft Office documents support
• Security capabilities: FIPS 140-2 government-grade data encryption, remote wipe of device and SD card
• Accessories: Elite Silver BT Headset, Universal Travel Charger, P893 Portable Power Pack, 10.1-inch Lapdock 100, 14.1-inch Lapdock 500 Pro, Vehicle Navigation Dock, HD Station and HD Dock, Wireless Keyboard with Trackpad Mouse
• Moto ACTV compatibility
• 4G LTE via Verizon

The RAZR will support 4G LTE via Verizon and come with 16GB onboard memory and 16GB memory card bundled with it.

 Having the charger port at the top of the phone makes it a bit inconvenient to use the phone for calls while charging, but otherwise the location of the ports, cards and buttons makes sense.  There's been some deal made about the battery not being removable on this phone by the end user - it must be replaced by Verizon.  Again, I don't have an issue with this as I don't carry a spare battery, and as I'll describe in more detail below I've configured this phone to last over a day on a charge with normal use.  If a hard reset is necessary, this can be done by holding the power button and volume down at the same time.

I was surprised to find that only 3 GB of the onboard memory is available for applications.  It's a lot more than I had on my previous phone, the HTC Evo 4g, but I expected that the entire 16GB of onboard memory would be available - aside from the portion needed to run the Android OS, of course.  It is possible to move portions of many applications to the sd card to save space but this is cumbersome and I've had it cause problems with widgets for applications - they don't seem to work when the application is moved to the sd card.

Eventually I stopped admiring my phone and actually turned it on and started using it.  The phone is fully charged rapidly, the first time it took 3 hours and since then I think it's been under 2 hours from 10% to fully charged.  When powering on the device for the first time I was walked through the setup wizard which I was familiar with having come from another android phone.  My previous phone used HTC's Sense interface and the Razr has the Motorola (don't call me Blur) interface.  I honestly don't know what they're calling it now, so I'll just call it the MotoUI.

Generally speaking, I don't like the MotoUI as much as Sense.  It's not bad, it just doesn't feel quite as intuitive.  The Sense interface is bright and attractive, well known for the oversized clock and weather widget on the home screen.  The Razr has nothing like this and thought it's not a functional issue, I miss it.
Instead, the Razr's interface keeps with the 'Droid' theme - it's a bit dark and robotic.  Even the default text notification sound is a robotic voice saying 'droid.'  Frankly I think going this direction limits the market for this phone.  Though I know two women who own it, I certainly don't think the theme is one that would attract female customers.  Then again, I've never known much about women.  That's another blog though.

What Motorola has done well is provide some platforms to bring together various social media and text applications.  There is a messaging inbox that has links to both individual text and chat applications and also a universal inbox with them all aggregated into one feed.  There is a similar aggregation for social media applications.
Another welcome application from Motorola is the Smart Actions they've included.  This fantastic app provides an amazingly powerful and flexible means to automatically manage your phone.  You make use of triggers like time and location to launch apps, turn off your ringer, disable the wifi radio, and more.  The options are nearly endless and it works great.  Not only is Smart Actions functional, it also can increase the battery life significantly by intelligently turning off features when you don't need them - i.e. background data, wifi, and gps can be disabled overnight, then set to turn on at a certain time OR when the phone is moved.  Pretty slick stuff.

Speaking of battery life - at first I would say the battery life was OK.  Better than my old phone, but I wasn't getting a full day out of a charge like I had hoped and expected.  I found that the Android OS was using up the greatest percentage of my battery, whereas my friend with a Bionic had that as the third greatest drain behind the display and sleep mode.  He was getting a solid day out of his battery, so I did a little investigating to see if I could figure out what might be draining mine.

What I found really surprised me.  Fortunately, some enterprising person with a great deal more patience and technical know-how then I have did extensive research on the subject for all of us.  I recommend anyone with an android phone read the entire post here, but the takeaway is that widgets can really kill the battery life.  I've removed all of mine.  I can certainly add them back one at a time until one of them starts to drain the battery and then I'll know who the culprit is, but it just isn't that important to me.  Android is great about notifications and otherwise I use shortcuts to apps which works fine for me.  So now I have very frequent data polling, push email, live wallpaper, and I can use my phone regularly and get over 24 hours on a charge.  I think with heavy use it will still get me through a work day, unless I'm using the phone as a mobile hotspot of course.  Bottom line - I'm very happy with the battery life as far as the hardware is concerned, Android has some work left to do from an OS perspective (or maybe it's the fault of the widget developers, hard for me to say).

The Razr touchscreen is a dream come true.  Everything with this phone is just instantaneous - sometimes it feels like the Droid is a step ahead of me.  The sensitivity is perfect, and I just love it.  Apps appear instantly.  I can individually clear items from the notification window-shade.  I'm probably gushing, because it's just truly fantastic.

I have five home screens to customize, and apps or widgets (if you still care about those after reading above) can be added from the Menu button or a long press on the screen or from a long press on the app in the Apps list.  The latter is now one page long and scrolls page by page to the right.  All very smart and good improvements.  There are four software buttons that remain static on each home page and these too are customizable - again very smart.  One of the things I love about Android is the ability to make it fit my needs.

One problem I've had is with the Calender.  I have one google account for personal use and one for work.  The calendar synced fine for my personal account but none of my existing calendar entries appeared for my work account.  New entries appear fine, and I didn't have enough old ones that it was a big problem for me, so I didn't spend any time trying to fix this, but it could really be a problem for some people if they had the same bug.

Additionally, I wasn't able to login to the My Verizon app to check my data usage, etc. but after 24 hours that started working.

Without a doubt, the biggest unsolved problem has to do with the mobile hotspot feature.  One of my laptops can connect to the phone's hotspot but doesn't get an ip address.  My other laptop connects and gets an ip address but can't go to any https site.  There are many users with this issue and it's been reported and discussed on the Motorola forums.  I don't know if the problem is Verizon's or Motorola's, but this needs to be fixed pronto, especially with what they charge for this feature (an additional $20 a month with 2GB extra data).

As with almost every phone on every carrier, Verizon has felt it necessary to put maybe half a dozen apps on the phone that I don't use, don't want, and cannot uninstall.  They are not intrusive but it drives me nuts - when will carriers and computer manufacturers stop doing this?

All in all, I love this phone.  It's sleek, wicked fast, has a nice looking screen (I don't understand the complaints I've read, it looks great to me), plenty of memory and for the most part it works great.  I expect some issues with any new phone, and the Droid Razr has exceeded my expectations in this area.  Neither my wife nor my friend have had any issues with theirs either.  Oh, and since it's a phone, I guess I should mention that call quality is fine.  Not great, but not bad.  Since it's Verizon I haven't had an issue connecting or hearing anyone, and the entire time I've had the phone it's had a 4G signal (I live in Atlanta).

The hype surrounding the Galaxy Nexus is tempting, but I believe I'll stick with the Razr.  I feel in a hardware comparison it beats the Nexus, and it should have Android's Ice Cream Sandwich update first quarter next year according to Motorola.  I'm glad I gave this phone a try as I'm quite happy with it.

Bonus review!
I bought the OtterBox Commuter Series case for the phone and I love it.  It is absolutely top quality.  I got it for just over $20 on amazon.com, and it came with a screen protector which went on great and has an excellent feel to it.  I've never put a screen protector on before and this one went on with ease, no bubbles and perfectly positioned.  My finger glides over it very nicely.  I previously had a Zagg Invisible Shield which cost half as much as the case and was far too tacky for my taste.
The case itself is a silicone inner layer protected by a harder poly-carbonate shell.  I especially like that this shell is not grippy like silicone, so the phone slips in and out of my pocket with ease.  I highly recommend this case if you have a Razr.

The first step is the hardest...

I guess I'll do like they suggested in school and use this first entry to tell you what I'm going to tell you.

I love tech.  I love games and gadgets.  I stream netflix from my phone, roku, xbox360, and bluray player.  I'm always on the lookout for the next gadget or service that will make life better or easier or cooler.

On top of this I enjoy what social media has done for all of us.  I get 'updates' on gear and games from Twitter (via Tweetdeck).  I can get feedback from 100's of people by making a post with a hashtag.  Granted, it ain't scientific research, but crowd-sourcing information if a newborn and will only get better.  Just ask movie studios - a new flic can easily be done after opening night based on the power of social media - word gets out FAST.

So what does this all have to do with some Schmo starting another blog?  I think it comes down to the defining value of information - trust.  Let's take a recent example.

After a little under two years with Sprint I've had enough and I'm switching my wife and I back to Verizon Wireless.  As part of the process we were in the market for new smartphones, so I began researching which Android phone would be perfect for each of us.  Not so easy right now as there are some great choices with the Droid Razr, the HTC Rezound, and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.  Much of my time was spent following trends on twitter, doing searches on Google, and sharing some of my findings on twitter, facebook and Google Plus.  What I found was that I started to have trust in certain people's tweets more than others, and certain people (some I knew and others I didn't) began to ask me for feedback on the purchase I made (I got the Razr for a penny from Amazon).

Reviews from the big tech sites are great, but people still like to ask someone they know what they think about something - and for good or bad after we interact via social media we begin at a certain point to feel that we 'know' one another.  It's not a big reach to follow this line of thinking, after all this is what Netflix's entire movie recommendation logarithm is based on; they start to see similarities between user's rankings and use that to predict what else they might have in common.

Likewise, I follow someone on twitter or facebook because I like what he or she has to say, and over time I get to 'know' the person and value their opinion to some degree.

Or maybe I'm full of crap.

Nonetheless, here I am with my own little tech blog.  Next up I'll share my initial thoughts on the Razr as I continue to break it in and consider whether I'll swap it for a Galaxy Nexus (assuming the latter is ever brought to market).

That's all for now, Happy Black Friday everybody.