Google Voice promises to be a major threat in the telecoms space. As a service that uses your data connection to allow free calls and text messages in the US, it could prove a potential loss of revenue for carriers who depend on income from your phone calls and text messages to prop up their bottom line.
Not only is Google pushing the app out aggressively, it’s even gotten a new competitor at the end of last month, when 3jam rolled out its own GV-like app for mobile phones. While, on the surface, both beta-phase services do the same thing, performing call-forwarding, sending SMS, collecting voicemail and other phone-related actions, they do foster some large differences that make the case for choosing either of the two pretty clear-cut, at least, at this point in time.
Google Voice, for one, is 100% free; 3Jam, on the other hand, requires a $5/month subscription, along with premium SMS rate, if you want to send more than 40 text messages a month. While both apps are still in beta, the former works only in the US (and is currently invitation-only), while the latter is open to users in every country.
For that $5 a month, 3Jam’s main advantage is that you get to keep your cellphone number, while Google Voice requires you to get a new GV number that will forward to everything else. As for other advantages, it offers a considerably better interface, supports group texts and calling multiple phone lines per account.
While those features may sound dandy, Google Voice will likely coopt the same capabilities eventually, save for keeping your number, as their initial foray has already veered from that. It also allows for multiple customized voice mail greetings, offers call screening and recording, and can initiate cell calls directly from a computer – all things 3Jam doesn’t do.
Being in beta, both services still come with plenty of problems. Visual Voicemail, for instance, which is an automatic speech-to-text transcoding of messages is terrible and largely unusable on both platforms. There are bugs galore on both systems, which means it might be best to wait till next year to actually choose one. I know I will.
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