Google Voice and Sprint Make a Very Nice Couple | Epicenter | Wired.com: You go to Google Voice, sign up with a Sprint number, and your phone magically turns into a Google Voice phone. Existing users can go into their list of phones and click a link to turn their Sprint phone into the magic phone.
If you don’t already have a Google Voice account, it’s quite simple. Your Sprint number simply becomes your Google Voice number — without having to port it over — making it super easy to have one number to rule them all.
For those with existing Google Voice numbers — or those like me who have already ported over a number to Google Voice, the process works the opposite way.
... and then comes a long list of dealbreakers. Like this one:
Google Voice number largely becomes your cellphone’s number
... and these:
Voicemail is now natively handled by Google Voice, but the default voicemail app won’t show them. You’ll have to find them in the Google Voice app.
This introduces the one of the oddnesses for existing users turning this on. You’ll have to make changes to your Google Voice app. The easiest way to do this is to switch this on for your phone on the Google Voice webpage, then uninstall the Google Voice app from your phone, then re-install it. This will keep your phone from continuing to make calls through Google Voice’s servers.
This is the easiest way?!
Google Voice numbers can not accept MMS messages. Any MMS sent to your Google Voice number will disappear into the digital dead-letter office, with no notice to the sender or recipient.
You can send an MMS from a Sprint-Google Voice phone through the native text-message app, but it will be sent out showing your Sprint number, not your Google Voice number. You can receive MMSes, but also only if people send it to your Sprint number. For new users turning their Sprint number into their Google number, however, sending and receiving MMSes is just fine.
But given that the real point of Google Voice is that people only need to use one number for you, this is a big drawback for current Google Voice users.
... and then it ends like this:
All-in-all, though, the new Sprint integration is a no-brainer for existing and non-Google Voice users.
No-brainer for non-users, yes! ... For existing users, no, no, no, no, no. Not so much....