Will Google Voice Kill the Cell Phone?

Can the child of GrandCentral, Google Voice, kill the cell phone? The answer is yes, it can. I don't know if it will. Before you just right me off as a nut job, let's look at the state of technology.

I purchased my first cell phone 22 years ago. It didn't look like what you call a cell phone. It was a 10Kg (22 pound) crate (with the carry ‘strap'). The service was $100 USD a month, and service was $1.00 a minute. It changed my life for the better.

A few years ago, GrandCentral was not such a major impact. Having only 1 voice mail and phone number to manage didn't make a big change for me since I used call forwarding (*72/*73) to accomplish the same tasks. Getting my Voice Mails by MP3 attachments in email is nice. And not the ‘killer' application my first cell was.

Google bought GrandCentral. That integrated my ‘stuff' a little more. It is now Google Voice. I may never get another cell phone again. Here's why.
 
Wi-Fi is getting more coverage. The price of Wi-Fi is moving down, towards free. Some airports offer it for free now. National USA service in hot-spots at a flat annual fee is available from many vendors. The high end is AT&T at about $100 a month. So we have $100 as the high-end of a base for unlimited wireless IP. (Cricket is less than half that). And let's stick with the far end of the curve to see if my thoughts hold water.

OK. The next item would be a netbook. Spawned from the One Laptop per Child idea, netbooks are taking the world by storm. Less then $500 gets you a one kilo computer.

That gives you a ‘cloud based' computer that is only missing your ‘phone'. Please don't tell me about Skype or other VoIP ‘phones'. I practically alpha and beta-test for a living.

The restrictions I have discovered using alien IP addresses (loads of International Travel) have seen services become something I cannot pay because of a ton of reasons. In the end, I don't have to pay for a service that costs zero. Or if Google is billing me the penny or two a minute for an "international" call, it comes from what I have already setup in the USA.
 
Opps. Back to the Netbook. Today, you couldn't give me one. Too much weight for too little operational hours. And my cell phone goes all day and night without re-charging. The reason is most cell phones today have an ARM CPU. Non-Geeks may not know what an ARM CPU is. It's a brand, not AMD not Intel, not IBM, etc.

As a Silicon Valley watcher, I can say I'm looking for my first netbook with an ARM CPU (for the same reasons ARM is in my cell phone).

Which brings us back to Google Voice.

A netbook that will let me see my Voice Mail transcribed as an email, from one number, which lets me call back (free to US phone numbers), in addition to the other ‘old' features of GrandCentral, which I manage by putting a Bluetooth adapter in the ARM netbooks USB port so my headset is whispering in my ear when I cannot read my netbook... I think I have arrived at my next ‘cell phone' 22 years later.

You will know that is true for me when you see I actually have a published phone number.

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• tags:
• GrandCentral
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• KillerApp
• |
• NetBook
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• GoogleVoice
• |
• ARM
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• BlueTooth
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• ARM

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