A few days ago I posted about my experience with the Google Voice integration with Sprint and outlined exactly how I did it. In the comments section, you guys responded with a lot of good thoughts and, in some cases, some serious bugs and questions. I have done a little bit of research, some testing, and some drinking (just kidding. Kind of), and I have some answers and responses for you upstanding, early-adopting citizens.
The Questions
1.How will this affect my MMS?
This was actually the main reason I chose to integrate my Sprint and Google Voice accounts. The short answer is this: If you want to use your Google Voice number in place of your Sprint number, you'll have to have people send MMS messages to your Sprint number. Google Voice still (inexplicably) does not support MMS, so that is all still handled by Sprint. At this point, it seems the integration isn't "deep" enough for your Voice number to even proper route MMS to your Sprint handset.
If you chose, like me, to "port" your Sprint number and use it as you Google Voice number, you can receive MMS like normal, but only on your Sprint handset. All other phones you have attached to your Voice account will not receive it in any way, shape, or form. If you're a big MMS sender/receiver, keeping your Sprint number is going to be the least painful option for you.
2. Notifications...WTH, man?
There is really no good solution for this at the moment. When you integrate, your text messages will begin coming to your Sprint phone in the conventional manner and, suckily enough, also to your Google Voice app. This means that you get two notifications for the price of one and it's super annoying. You've got a couple of options, all of which are kind of sucky:
- Uninstall the Google Voice app, losing notifications and transcriptions of voicemails.
- Turn off notifications in the Google Voice app, which is the same as option 1, but takes up more space on your phone. You'll have to manually check if you have voicemails.
- Turn on text message notifications for voicemails in the Google Voice settings on a desktop. This is probably the least suck-tastic of the options, but still isn't awesome.
- Apply for and get hired onto the Google Voice development team and design a setting to selectively disable notification types for the Android app.
3. Doesn't losing one of the numbers defeat the purpose of Google Voice?
This one is more speculative. Short answer, no, not really. The idea of Google Voice is to have a single phone number that unifies all of your phones spanning all parts of your life, making it only necessary to distribute a single phone number at which people can reach you. That's all I have to say about that.
4. I did this and now my I can't make outgoing calls on my phones with Google Voice installed. FIXITFIXITFIXITFIXIT!
If you have the Google Voice app set to "Use Google Voice to make all calls", it's likely that this happened to you if you opted to keep your Sprint number. It took some messing around, but I found a fix for it. The prompts that come up when you actually carry out the integration tell you to log out of the app and log back in to make the changes final. If that worked for you, you've got it easy. For me, the only phone that could make calls, even after doing that, was my Sprint phone. I had 3 other phones that couldn't make calls, and that was a turd. What ended up working was going into the Setting>Applications>Manage Applications>Google Voice>Clear data and logging back in. This worked on all my devices. From what I understand, it's because the app caches the call-out data for your contacts and that needs to be refreshed when you make the changeover.
5. If I'm connected to my Airrave I can't receive calls.
That is a shame. Google and Sprint evidently did not really think that through and there is no fix that I'm aware of at this point. Sorry, guys and gals.
6. Will SMS hit my Sprint bill if I'm using my Google Voice number?
Yes. Any SMS messages that go through Sprint (if you text through ANY application that isn't the Google Voice app), they will be reflected to Sprint as SMS. If you want free SMS, you're going to have to use the Voice web site or Google Voice app.
7. If I use my Sprint number as my Google Voice number, what happens if I bail on Sprint?
I am yet to receive a definitive answer on this, but you better believe I need this answered as much as any of you. I am most certainly researching this heavily and will get back to you about it if I get a final answer
Hopefully this helped some of you out and, if you have any additional questions, feel free to toss them into the comments section. I'll try and reply/update this ost as often and accurately as I can.