antimeria

502 errors from the 410.

I just got my Google Voice invitation today, and I’ve been experimenting with it on and off all morning. So far, it seems useful, if in a relatively limited way. Still, I did get a pretty awesome number: 410.77-KOREA (56732). More impressions after the jump.

Pros

• The obvious feature is that you have one stream for everything–cell, work, home (if you still have one), etc. This is actually only marginally useful for me, since I don’t have a land line at home and rarely use my work phone, but it could be a godsend to some.
• The service sends a text message, email alert, or both to you when you have a new message, complete with preview transcript.
• The transcription service is (thus far) reasonably accurate enough to get the gist of a message, as well as supremely fast–no longer than it would have taken for my phone to alert me I had a voicemail.
• Combined with transcription, the built-in audio player lets you easily jump to any part of the message–especially useful for garbled information, as well as skipping impossibly long, random digressions.
• You can call or text back from the GV interface–GV calls you, then connects to your voicemail interlocutor.
• You can block people, sending all their calls straight to voicemail. This is great for agoraphobes or sociopaths like myself.
• You can press * to switch phones mid-call. That is a very useful, thoughtful feature. Kudos, Google Voice.

Cons

• People have to call your GV number. Calls directly to your phones don’t get pulled in–a major issue with most work numbers.
• There’s no way to organize voicemails in GV itself–no labels or categories of any kind. Email notifications sent to Gmail can be labeled, but that’s a major oversight (Google–please sync them with Gmail, by the way).
• Adding contacts is hideously clunky. Unlike Gmail’s streamlined system, where frequently- (and infrequently) emailed contacts automatically pop up in the ‘to’ field, you have to add your (thankfully imported) Gmail contacts, then manually add numbers to each. For people with lots of frequently-called contacts, this would be a huge pain. These should also be synced.
• I’m mentioning these flaws not only for your edification, but because Google’s feedback system is broken and their spiders should find this. The feedback form has given me various server errors every time I’ve tried to submit it (I’ve given it at least five shots). Normally, that’d be understandable, considering it’s a semi-public beta, except for this:
  Google Docs is a pretty mature product. Overloaded servers aren’t going to win any new users, especially now that Microsoft plans to give away an online version of Office.
• It should be noted that Google Voice’s “most popular” support discussion is “Top 10 Reasons NOT to forward a phone TO Google Voice.”

More potentially-related posts:

1. A latecomer Nexus One review.
2. Foxy lady.
3. The Nexus One nexus.