Posts Tagged phone

Quick Thoughts on Google I/O Day One

This is going to be a bit of a rapid-fire, non-exhaustive list, but…

  1. Having an IDE other than Eclipse for Android dev makes me want to pick up the platform again. JetBrains, the makers of the IntelliJ IDE on which the new Android IDE is based, is a solid outfit (I use one of their other IDEs relatively regularly).
  2. I’m not buying a Galaxy S4 “Nexus Edition”. My S III is just fine, and the S4, in addition to being expensive, has the same problem that the Nexus 4 has: I can’t get 4G where I need it because Sprint is the only carrier that can do that.
  3. I should have gone to I/O. I wouldn’t pay full rack rate for the S4 Developer Edition or the Chromebook Pixel (though I’ve thought about the latter), but I would certainly use the heck out of said devices if they were included in the price of admission.
  4. Watch out, PayPal. Google isn’t the first to do person to person money transfers, but if you’ve got a Google Play account and Google has opened up the new “attach money” feature to you, the amount of effort required to send money to someone else is ridiculously low.
  5. The new Hangouts isn’t the first time Google has done photo sharing through chat (and the makers of Hello did a really good job with the app, speaking from personal experience). It’s been awhile though.
  6. Speaking of Hangouts, the fact that the service has been pushed in the direction of a persistent chat room with video calling et al as a situational add-on is…well…the way it should be.
  7. Per-minute billing (with either one-hour or ten-minute minimums) on Google’s IaaS compute offering is really cool. Nice to see Amazon one-upped at their own game, at least in this small way, and I’m sure that this will make sites that see serious traffic spikes for smallish periods take note of Google’s offering. Until its competitors implement the same thing, of course.
  8. The new Maps looks epic. If only I could actually use it.
  9. I want a H.264 (AVCHD) -> VP9 encoder (CLI is fine…integration into Handbrake is a nice bonus) yesterday. Or a whatever -> VP9 encoder, for that matter. I also want to know how VP9 compares to H.265 (is it inferior like VP8 is compared to H.264, or is it pretty comparable?)
  10. I, for one, welcome our new voice search enabled, auto-image-enhancing, auto-hash-tagging overlords. The competition is a click away, but they just aren’t up to snuff compared to Google in so many of these areas.

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Google Voice Draws Nigh…for me…

Just received this e-mail from Google about my account conversion from GrandCentral to Google Voice. I’ve had GrandCentral for awhile but have never really used it. Google Voice looks to be amazing, from the five minutes I played around with it on someone else’s account. Now it’s finally my turn, albeit with a reservation or two, as outlined in the e-mail below…guess this is why my account took so long to convert:

Hello

We’re happy to announce that your GrandCentral account can now be upgraded to Google Voice. In addition to the great GrandCentral features you already know, Google Voice gives you free transcription of all your voicemail, conference calling, and more. You can also use your Google Voice account to make low cost international calls and free calls to anywhere in the United States.

Unfortunately, there is a group of about 891 phone numbers for which we are not able to enable the new SMS feature. Your phone numbers is one of these that won’t support SMS, so we would like to offer you two upgrade options:

  1. You can upgrade your current GrandCentral number to Google Voice. You will get all new Google Voice features, except SMS.
  2. You can select a brand new Google Voice number that will support SMS. You can also keep your existing GrandCentral number working for the next 3 months while you tell people your new number, and you can still check voicemails to that number in your GrandCentral account.

Let us know which option you prefer here (link removed) and we will upgrade your account accordingly.

Thanks,

The Google Voice Team

Once the account converts, rest assured I’ll at least be blogging about it, if not writing a full-blown newspaper article about the service. Looking forward to getting some free calling in…

In case you’re wondering, I’m switching my number. Nobody knows my old number so it’s no great loss, and I really want the texting feature 🙂

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