Originally Posted by
wphamilton
That GVmate is pretty cool (I didn't know about it before now), and will purportedly still work after the XMPP shutdown. I'm not sure I trust it, or Google rather, since it's kind of a hack but keeping the free service and the phone company out of it is laudable in and of itself. If it even works for a few months you still come out ahead.
When I finally got a smartphone it was the Samsung offered by tracfone, so it was a matter of transferring the service over to it. No difference that way, except when you buy time for the smartphone you ALSO get some data (no extra charge!) so it was "might as well". Of course, I got screwed on the transfer. The customer rep said all of the minutes would transfer, but it wound up being only 120 out of around 600 that I had. It seems like anyone selling phone service of any kind just can't help it.
BTW you can keep the GV account and the Obi box when you get a DID. What worked for me is:
caller phone -> GV number -> DID number -> Obihai box -> your phone
so the caller only ever knows the GV number, since the DID is just inserted in the middle.
I know that Google Voice might not always be a sure thing, but for free I'll hang onto it for as long as I can. I looked into adding the DID number into the mix to keep using the GV but decided I didn't want to go there yet. GVMate seems simpler and should work for us. For $25, if we even only get a year out of it, it's well worth it. I'll keep the Obi box in case I want to use it again someday in the future. The savings we've got out of it, not paying for a landline, was well worth it.