Google Voice is great, especially if you’re on a mobile platform that offers a native Voice application (namely Android or BlackBerry). But if you’ve been using the service on a regular basis, you may have run into an odd issue: sometimes when you go to actually call someone there’s a lag, as if the phone isn’t altogether sure what it’s supposed to do when you tap on the ‘Call’ button next to a contact’s name. Today, Google is getting rid of that lag in its native applications.
As Google details in its blog post, that pause was due to Google Voice making a small data request to Google’s servers whenever you initiated a call, which would return the number the application was supposed to dial. That works well enough when you have a decent 3G or EDGE connection, but it can also lead to annoying timeouts and pauses when you don’t. The new version of the Voice applications fixes this by assigning a unique phone number to your contacts, bypassing the need to initiate a data connection. In other words, your outbound calls should be faster now.
Disclosure: The Google Voice team has ported my cell number over to the service, as they did with Michael’s number.
Google Voice is a free Internet service that uses VoIP technology to link phone numbers together. GrandCentral was relaunched as Google Voice on March 11, 2009 with new features, including voicemail transcriptions and SMS managing. Users of Google Voice are able to select a single U.S. phone number, from various area codes. When a Google Number is called, any or all of the user’s phones may be set to ring. Which phone(s) ring can be set based on...
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
