Wouldn’t it be uber cool to see one of these in an airport, just waiting for you to make an international call for a mere 2-5 cents a minute – or even FREE?? It’s like a nifty red TARDIS crossed with a magical cheap phone rate!
According to Techmeme:
“The purpose? To get people to try Google Voice and see how the voice quality compares to alternatives (and old-fashioned phones). Google wouldn’t say how many phone booths would be distributed, but said they should start appearing in the next few weeks (when they’ll reveal more details).”
Search Engine Land adds details:
“You pick up the handset, hear a little Google Voice greeting, then enter the number you wanted. It feels a bit weird to enter a # symbol at the end of your dialing. However, I didn’t realize this was required at first — and it worked OK…. The sound quality is very clear. The biggest issue is that you have to wait about 10 to 15 seconds for your call to be processed. That’s a switching delay that Google hopes to fix soon…. No particular airports are named, though the first university to get one of the phones will be likely be Arizona State University. How many booths? Google won’t say other than in the dozens.”
Danny Sullivan also pointed out the irony in that the British phone boxes are no longer used in the UK – and Google Voice is not yet available in this format in the UK.
The Google blog also announced free Google Voice from Gmail with click to call:
“Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.
Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.
We’ve been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant, to placing a call when you’re in an area with bad reception.
If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).”
This can be very handy, and puts Google voice up on a level with Skype for usability.
Tags: click to call, gmail, Google Voice, phone box, Skype