Well I just received an invite to Google Voice and I must say I was quite upset to discover that it is not yet available in Canada… nonetheless I had a socks box in Cali so I tunnelled my registration and was ready to rock.

For those of you unfamilliar with Socks – it basically pushes all requests through a secure connection on a remote system and is quite simple to do – take a look at my “How to Watch American TV in Canada” post from a while back.

Once I was in I ran into another little snag, you can not set your call-in number to an international DID (in my case a Canadian DID).  So I just pointed them to my free IPKall number and was really cooking with gas (you too can get a free IPKall DID at ipkall.com).

For those of you anticipating an invite yuo can expect the usual Google UI (thank god (I adore simplicity)), you can also look forward to transcribing your voicemail messages to text – and have them emailed.  This functionality has been lacking in Asterisk which is why I believe this is going to drop a nuke on the Asterisk devs to get this module out – so support your * developers will ya!

I’ve really only done minimal “tire-kicking” but I expect this could have many telcos shaking in their boots.  Not only is it super feature rich, sociable and ridiculously easy to use – it is backed by a company who has provided extremely reliable services since day one.

It is interesting to see the callout function implementation.  There have been plenty of callout scripts for Asterisk (which pretty much work exactly the same – Asteristickies is one of ‘em) but once again Google has made it that much friendlier.  Callout is a dialing function when you input a number to call, it connects to you first – then dials the remote party.

SMS is a joy! I was lucky enough to have my sister visiting this week with her unlimited text messaging plan.  I popped open the SMS box and we were sending messages with ease instantaneously.  I especially love the contact manager.  Being able to maintain a list of contacts with click to call functionality is a very powerful feature.

Anyway, I am very excited to play with my new toy – feel free to give me a ring at

(361)-GEEK-HUT

Heh… or use this thing

UTStarcom released a new firmware image for its F3000 wireless phone.  I have written about this device in the past and at the time  had not used it enough to fully consider all of its weaknesses – my apologies if you purchased it based on my recommendation.

There is however some good news.  I found myself unable to get this thing to register at all last week and decided to test out the new firmware to see if it would fix the problem, luckily it did.  I find the phone is no longer as hot while in use, it also appears to handoff much nicer.

There still are issues with connectivity as well as battery life though I now feel as if I wasn’t completely ripped off (plus I got text messaging to work).  The phone was quickly discontinued and the company offers little to no support, I believe they still occasionally release new images (probably because they feel guilty for selling this to people).  Bottom line : don’t buy it unless it is super cheap! If you have one already don’t give up on it.  Upgrade the firmware and lets hope for more bug fixes in the future.