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Google Voice Alternative (kinda)

S

schasta

Lurker
ABOUT MY PHONE: I have a Motorola Photon 4G through Sprint, and have the unlimited Data/Text Plan (plus like 450 minutes)

There's a couple features I like about Google Voice and a lot of features I don't. I was wondering if there's an app that has what I want without all the stuff I don't.

What I like about Google Voice
- Can send/receive texts from any computer
- Can access all my voicemails from any computer
- Online backup of all my texts/voicemails
- Ability to record phone calls

What I don't like about Google Voice

It essentially has to hijack my phone in order to work. ALL my calls texts and voicemails have to go through Google Voice BEFORE I can receive them on my phone, so if Google Voice is working improperly (which is quite often), my phone has trouble working as a phone. Even when it is working properly, it is noticeably slower in receiving calls/texts/voicemails then without it.

So, my question is, is there an alternative to google voice that does what I want without having to essentially 'hijack' my phone?
 
What problems, exactly, are you having?

I've been using Google Voice a long time for both calls and texts and have had no such problems whatsoever. It's really been rock solid reliable.
 
I've also used GV for years and thousands of calls with NO problems. And if it ever does go down, only calls to a GV number would be affected. Calls to a regular number would go through fine.

GV is the only Google service I find too useful to resist. Hasn't 'hijacked' my phone - not sure what you mean.
 
I have it and can use it - but find the instructions for GV very confusing.

Also, no way to turn off what you don't want. I do not use voice mail. I prefer missed calls. I never bothered to check the answering machine when we had a landline. It was mostly used to deal with spammers.
 
Well, I should probably start a new thread for this, but since it was asked I'll explain the problems I've had with Google Voice:

- There's a short delay on my calls coming in, and sometimes calls simply don't come in, especially when I'm in roaming. It will ring on their end, but I simply won't receive it, and it won't show that I had a missed call for a couple minutes.

- Voicemails usually take about 10 minutes before I can listen to them on my phone (unless I'm in wifi)

- Texts can take a while sometimes. One time, I wasn't getting texts until a couple days after they were sent to me. I received them on my google voice account, but not on my phone. I eventually started using my google voice app on my phone to read texts instead of my native messaging app, since it was forwarding them to it before.

So I guess those were the problems I was having with GV, and I was never able to realize why they were happening, so I got rid of it. I can't imagine I did anything wrong setting it up, it's pretty simple. It just seemed to not work as seemlessly as I had hoped all the time. The cons outweighed the pros in the end.
 
Crashdamage said:
I've also used GV for years and thousands of calls with NO problems. And if it ever does go down, only calls to a GV number would be affected. Calls to a regular number would go through fine.
Click to expand...

I guess I should also note that my cell phone number and my google voice number are one and the same. I think this is a new feature through sprint (maybe other cell providers too, but I have sprint). And calls/texts through GV is fine, just since I had GV set up it doesn't seem to work well through my phone.
 
Sprint integrates GV differently than other carriers and in typical Sprint fashion, it's not good. Many people on Sprint have issues with GV, but it's not GV's fault. But some of your problems are just due to slow data speed (Sprint is slowest of the big 4).
 
Well, I'm locked into a two year contract with Sprint... so back to my original question: Is there a good alternative to GV that does the things listed above because Sprint doesn't work well with GV?
 
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