Our household is amongst the ~17.5% household in US that does not have a landline and while it has worked very well, there has been occasions where we have felt that having a stationary phone would have been nice.
Recently this got me thinking as I got a Google Voice account (by having one in GrandCentral which Google bought a while back). Here is how we do telephony in our household:
- Mobiles – both of us have one but it’s always on silent/vibrate not to risk waking up our baby, so we do miss calls. Also a lot of times we are not home and wish to make international calls to family, in which case having Google voice (see below) & a Rebtel account really helps.
- Landline – We have a skype-in number (with skype-out feature) that we use through a Voip phone (Netgear SPH200D) which hooks up directly to our internet router so we are not dependent on a computer (and skype software) being on. And it ends up being much cheaper than paying monthly fee for landline. Of course if your internet connection is down, so is your ‘landline’ with this solution.
- Google Voice (GV) – And finally the part that brings it all together: Having a GV nr allows people to call this nr, which in turn will ring all the other phones until someone picks up or it goes to voicemail. Voicemails gets transcribed to text and searchable from gmail. Further you can receive txt msgs on this nr. There are tons of other features on GV beyond these though. Some of my favorite features:
And I expect soon enough Googletalk will be part of this solution which then really makes the possibilities endless.
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Reviews, Tech
A long time ago I switched to Firefox mostly because of its extremly useful plug-in model (which also includes add-ons such as ieTab). I do use Internet Explorer (IE) from time to time since certain sites still are optimized (or only work) for/on IE.
Then came Google Chrome along and at a first brief encounter (installed on my Windows Server 2008 machine), I wasn’t impressed with the promised speed along with the fact that there were virtually no plugins out there to use.
A couple of months passed and I kept reading in blogs and other places about the amazing performance of this browser (e.g. test done by ExtremeTech), so I decided to give it a week on my Vista machine just in case in case…and surely I started seeing results. Web pages do load faster and I really find the omnibar very useful saving me both time and click as it tends to find what I am looking for 85% of time as the first result.
So even though I have to give up a few of my plugins (and thereby features) due to chrome being so new on the market and lacking proper plugins, I still find it worth it even if the speed gain is 2.3% (according to the tests). You may think above certain limit small gain in speed does not matter and it’s more of a marketing ploy. I disagree because performance hit even in small dosage is very noticeable and frustrating, so I take performance over feature richness if I have to.
I heard of qik.com a while back and been wanting to try it out but unfortunately it was not available for Windows Mobile phones. To summarize it in one line: the site allows you to stream live video from your phone on the net.
Why is this so cool? If you think about it, a major part of having family/friends close to you geographically means that you get to know about the small details of their lives as you have frequent interactions which provides this wonderful aspect. You know, small seemingly unimportant details that we feel there is no time to share or are simply not important enough when we are thousands of miles away from each other and chat over the phone/skype/chat etc.
With my (3G) Nokia and Qik installed on it, all I need to do is send a text msg to whoever I want to share a visual moment with, be it when I am at a concert, our baby doing something cute or some other share-worthy event happens, and they can get on qik site and watch it live (with ~10 seconds lag). It also gets recorded in case you want to see it later. No more a need for a web cam connected to computer with internet connection.
And here is an actual example of a situation when it was very useful : When being at a pool with our daughter Carmel, I sent a text message to my parents telling them they can get on qik.com which they did back in Finland, and they were able to enjoy Carmel, seeing her splash and laugh in the pool, *live*. Alternative to this would have been to record it on the phone or other camera, download it to a computer, upload it to youtube.com, send an email to them to watch it which at best would have been a few hours after the event; not anywhere as good as watching something live and feeling you are part of it.
