When I got my G1 I also got a Google Voice account. I believe Google Voice is a great idea, but like the G1/Android it's fraught with bad design decisions and bad UI.

The basic idea is that Google Voice acts as a phone aggregator. You can call my google voice number and all my phones (cell, blackberry, and desk phone) will ring. Meanwhile, google voice will ask you to state your name. When I pick up the phone, it will say "You are receiving a call from so-and-so." I can then send you to voicemail (which I can listen to you leave), pick up the phone, or reject the call outright. I can also transfer the call between phones on the fly in case I need to leave my desk or my battery is getting low. The service also allows you to route outgoing calls from any phone through your google voice number, preserving the privacy of your caller ID on your main phones. Because of this, international calls are much cheaper using google voice.

The website for google voice is similar to gmail. Your voicemails are transcribed (sometimes hilariously inaccurately) as they are left, and a text version appears in your "inbox" along with an option to play the message. Google Voice also handles text messages, showing them similar to the way IM conversations are shown in gmail. Your gmail contacts are also available from the google voice interface, and you can set certain response actions for certain contacts or groups. For instance, when my family calls they don't have to state their name and they get connected immediately instead of waiting for me to press 1 on the phone. The most interesting feature of the website is that you can initiate calls straight from there, typing in a destination phone and choosing one of your phones to connect to. Google will call your phone, wait for you to pick up, and then call your target's number and connect the two.

This all sounds great, right? Well the problem is that it's SLOW and the google voice app is generally crap. Plus the service has failed a number of times already. Outgoing calls through google voice can take up to 10 seconds to begin ringing. Text messages don't arrive right away. Incoming calls sometimes ring 3-4 times before they start ringing my phones. I understand google has been having server trouble recently, but that kind of delay in voice communication is unacceptable.

The app for google voice is alright, but nothing special. You can't make calls from the android app, it simply hooks into the outgoing call feature and overrides it. This can be confusing at first, since the "voice" app doesn't explicitly allow for "voice" calls, but once you make a call it clearly says "USING GOOGLE VOICE" on the screen, so that's forgivable. You can also send and receive text messages on the GV app, but GV also forwards those messages on to your phone, so I'm not sure what the benefit is. There's an options page on Google Voice called "Voicemail and SMS" but there aren't any SMS options on it. Maybe that's a future feature, but for right now any text I receive is received twice. Not really all that handy.

As for the service reliability, my wife has NEVER successfully completed a call in the week she's had a google voice account. She eventually gave up and went back to using multiple phone numbers. She uses it now in an attempt to save on text messaging rates and that's it.

Like the Android platform, Google Voice is a fantastic idea implemented by brilliant people, and it suffers from lack of cohesion and polish. It shouldn't take so long to complete a call, it shouldn't be so difficult to make a call, and I shouldn't get text messages twice. Honestly, if Apple had a more open attitude toward the community, less DRM, and a non-exclusive contract with AT&T I'd get an iPhone and drop google voice entirely. The whole experience is an exercise in frustration, especially since I know it's GOOGLE and not some kid in his garage. Google is held to higher standards than everyone else, and they need to start acting like it.

Despite all this, Google Voice gets a WIN, but only because it has no direct replacement. I could just as easily have gotten an iPhone instead of my G1 and lived with the crappy app store policies and terrible AT&T service. However, nobody lets me get a phone number that routes to all 3 phones in my life, and nobody gets me free calls to my parents in Canada except google. The concept is wonderful, but again, the execution is sub par.