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Google Voice is Google’s VOIP telephone product that provides call forwarding capabilities, unique phone answering messages, transcribed voicemail and a host of other functionality.  The Google Voice application for the Blackberry allows you to use your Google Voice number on your BlackBerry, while also extending many of these features to your native BlackBerry phone number.   In short it’s a phone upgrade, but it’s not a seamless one so you will have to decide for yourself if the benefits outweigh the difficulties.

To use the Google Voice application you need a Google Voice account from Google.  Until recently these were a little difficult to get as Google distributed invitations slowly, like they did with Gmail and Google Wave, but they are becoming easier and easier to get your hands on now.  Once you’ve set up your Google Voice account then you are ready to use the app on your BlackBerry.  A lot of the Google Voice features like call forwarding, unique answering messages, etc. are all managed from the Google Voice website and I won’t explain or review those here.  I’m just going to focus on using Google Voice on your BlackBerry and the application itself.

The application has two primary tabs Dialer and Inbox.  The Dialer tab functions similarly to the native BlackBerry Call Log.   At the top is a field into which you can enter a phone number and below is a log of recent incoming and outgoing numbers.  The dialer entry field does not support contact name entry like the Call Log does, only digits, but like in the Call Log you can make calls and text message from the list of recent incoming and outgoing numbers and from the address book.

To dial from the list of recent calls, just highlight a name or number, click the menu button and select the option you want.  To call from the address book, select that option from the menu, find the contact that you are looking for in your address book and then select Call or SMS using Google Voice.

All calls and texts from the Google Voice application use your Google Voice number, NOT your BlackBerry native number so you don’t use up your plan minutes or text message allocation. Yup free calling and free text messaging (although you do need to pay for a data plan to get those free services).  Keep in mind though that calls and text messages made from the Google Voice application will show up in caller ID as your Google Voice number, not your native BlackBerry number.

The Inbox displays both the transcribed voicemails and text messages that you’ve received.  Voice messages have a blue dot with a telephone icon and text messages have a purple dot with a icon that looks like a block of text.  Frankly the transcription text messages are still a work in progress.  The voicemail transcription is only about 30% accurate so I find that it’s useful for delivering the gist of a message, but I would never rely on it for detail.  Google Voice provides a good way of showing the accuracy of the transcriptions by having the words that Google is more sure about in bold and the words they are less positive about in plain text.

Listening to your voicemail is as simple as calling your Google Voice number from the Google VCoice app or downloading the voicemail to your phone for playback.  When you do this the words in the transcription highlight in red as the message plays out.

The labels functionality in the menu allows you to sort your messages by starred items, voicemail, SMS, recorded, placed, spam, etc.  That’s handy to a degree, but you cannot search your messages nor can you star them, add notes or spam them from the BlackBerry application.  All of these features must be done through the Google Voice website.

The Google Voice website is also where you can link up your mobile number with Google Voice which then allows you to take advantage of just about all of the Google Voice features when callers use your native BlackBerry phone number.  In essence linking your mobile number to Google Voice forwards calls from your BlackBerry number to your Google Voice number so that you can use custom messages, have voicemails transcribed, etc.  With this and the seamless integration of the Google Voice app with your Address Book you almost don’t need your BlackBerry Call Log.

Unfortunately there are a few thorns to this rose.  First, while the Google Voice application is not that big it seems to have a memory leak.  I might be wrong about that, but when I removed it from my BlackBerry for awhile functionality improved immensely. Second, either because of battery limitations or as a concession to the cellular phone companies, Google Voice does not check for messages continuously which means you’ll only get notifications about text messages and voicemail every 5 minutes or more.  The refresh frequency is an option in the Settings menu that you can set for every 5 minutes to hourly or never.  I find this extremely limiting especially for text message conversations, but luckily the integration with your BlackBerry email gives you great workaround.  From the Google Voice website you can set SMS and voicemail alerts to be sent to an email address.  Point it to an email address that your BlackBerry Message program receives and bingo, you get the instantaneous alerts that you need.  The final bit of aggravation is that you are running 2 phone applications on your BlackBerry.  This means that you have 2 applications to manage, 2 sets of call and SMS links in your menus, and just a little more clutter and duplication in your life and on your phone.

Personally I’ve gotten used to having 2 phone applications on my BlackBerry and for me the benefits of the application outweigh the memory issues and functionality workarounds that I have to deal with.  As I see it, I am getting the benefits of Google Voice and the Android phone operating system wiuthout giving up my BlackBerry.  I’m pleased enough with that to not rush out for a Droid phone, but a lot of people won’t put up with the hassle.  Which begs the question, with the Android platform gaining ground for how long will supporting folks like me and my BlackBerry continue to be worthwhile to Google.

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