Google Voice – Fixing the Cellphone Voicemail Problem

So, I love Google Voice and have been using it for years, ever since it was Grand Central.  Today, I finally figured out how to reign in the problem with voicemails showing up in either my cell phone voicemail or my Google Voice voicemail.  It was starting to become unbearable to have to check both places for voicemails that were left when people dialed my GVoice number.  Here’s what causes the problem:  When someone dials my Google number and I click ignore, or am out of service coverage, my Sprint voicemail kicks in early causing Google to think that Ive picked up the phone meaning that the calls are connected straight to my Sprint voicemail and then they would leave a message there.  If I was in service but just let the phone ring, Google would time out knowing that I hadn’t picked up in which case the caller would be connected to my Google voicemail.  Depending on where I was or what I was doing, voicemails could have ended up in either place.  Depending on your cell phone carrier you have to enable two or three types of call fowarding so that if you click Ignore on your phone, are out of service or have your phone off, your cell carrier will forward the calls to your GVoice number.  If you are on Sprint, the forwarding service is 20 cents per minute while the person is leaving you a voicemail.  For me, that cost is worth it so that I dont go crazy tracking down voicemails anymore.  I believe it is free on the other carriers.  For instructions on enabling this feature for the various carriers, click here.

Google Releases Positive Q1 Financials

Google released its 1st quarter earning report just now.  They reported a revenue of $4.1Billion versus a forecast by wall street of $4.09Billion for the first quarter of 2009.  They also announced an earnings per share figure of $5.16 compared to a wall street forecast of $4.93.  This is great news for the technology sector and I would look for the market to trend upwards tomorrow on the heals of this news.

Android 1.5: New and Improved

Google really surprised me when they released their own mobile operating system. Why do I say that?  Because Google was always supposed to put out a web-based OS, one that you would access through nothing more than a web browser.  This was what we all were anticipating 5 years ago.  That still has not become a reality, but they are really making waves in the mobile world.  Here is the latest list of improvements to Android 1.5:

Overall User Interface Improvements for:

• In-call experience
• Contacts, Call log, and Favorites
• SMS & MMS
• Browser
• Gmail
• Calendar
• Email
• Camera & Gallery
• Application management

Performance improvements

• Faster Camera start-up and image capture
• Much faster acquisition of GPS location (powered by SUPL AGPS)
• Smoother page scrolling in Browser
• Speedier GMail conversation list scrolling

New features

• On-screen soft keyboard
  • Works in both portrait and landscape orientation
  • Support for user installation of 3rd party keyboards
  • User dictionary for custom words
• Home screen
  • Widgets
    • Bundled home screen widgets include: analog clock, calendar, music player, picture frame, and search
  • Live folders
• Camera & Gallery
  • Video recording
  • Video playback (MPEG-4 & 3GP formats)
• Bluetooth
  • Stereo Bluetooth support (A2DP and AVCRP profiles)
  • Auto-pairing
  • Improved handsfree experience
• Browser
  • Updated with latest Webkit browser & Squirrelfish Javascript engines
  • Copy ‘n paste in browser
  • Search within a page
  • User-selectable text-encoding
  • UI changes include:
    • Unified Go and Search box
    • Tabbed bookmarks/history/most-visited screen
• Contacts
  • Shows user picture for Favorites
  • Specific date/time stamp for events in call log
  • One-touch access to a contact card from call log event
• System
  • New Linux kernel (version 2.6.27)
  • SD card filesystem auto-checking and repair
  • SIM Application Toolkit 1.0
• Google applications
  • View Google Talk friends’ status in Contacts, SMS, MMS, GMail, and Email applications
  • Batch actions such as archive, delete, and label on Gmail messages
  • Upload videos to Youtube
  • Upload photos on Picasa