Google Voicemail on your Pre ...For a Price
Pining for Visual Voicemail on the Pre? We don't have it quite yet, but the Google Voice Blog brings good news: they've made it easier for you to replace your Sprint voicemail with theirs. This will get you (comically bad) transcriptions, email and sms alerts, and more. It's quite nice. Technically, using Google Voice for your voicemail isn't a new feature, but getting it set up before was quite a hassle.
Here's the bad news: Sprint currently charges $.20 per call per minute (thanks amateurhack!) to forward calls. This means yours truly had to give up his plan to switch to GV with a magical call/sms forwarding scheme (weep for your blogger), but what it really means for you is that it's going to cost you a fifth of a buck to get a voicemail on this system. Luckily, per Syph on Twitter, it looks like Sprint is going to take the ax to that silly charge soon:
The Palm Pre is a great Google Voice platform thanks to apps like dkGoogleVoice and gDial Pro, so if you have an invite it's worth considering. Speaking of Google Voice invites, we gave three away last week during our live PalmCast: Congrats to Ronald, Mark, and Tony!
Update: Rick lets us know that Google and Sprint have announced "conditional free call forwarding," which is a roundabout way of saying Sprint will still charge the $.20 per minute on forwarded calls -- but not calls forwarded to Google Voice. They're rolling it out across accounts now, should be finished by mid-November.
