Google voicemail will be free in Nov.

[lars7575]

Voice services continue to play a central role in mobile communications, even as data grows. Application developers have created a number of voicemail and messaging services that take advantage of call forwarding capabilities. Sprint announced today that it will not charge customers for certain types of call forwarding. Conditional call forwarding for busy calls or calls not answered using the customer’s wireless phone will be free, beginning mid-November. (Standard charges will continue to apply for immediate call forwarding.)3 This change will give Sprint customers the opportunity to access third-party voice services, including the new voicemail feature in Google VoiceTM
Sprint | News Release: Sprint Outlines "Open" Approach at Ninth Annual Developer Conference

[lastdetailwd]

Great find!! Thanks, this will be great when it happens!

[lastdetailwd]

No one else is excited about this?!

[rmt5]

I'm actually extremely excited about this. The prospect of being able to read transcribed voicemails over SMS is particularly appealing to me (although I know the transcriptions are pretty bad at this point). It's useful though for long meetings. Now if we could only get integrated visual voicemail...

[QuietStorm21A]

Originally Posted by lastdetailwd

No one else is excited about this?!

I am very excited and can't wait. It is such a great time to be a Sprint customer.

[CheshireFrog]

Originally Posted by QuietStorm21A

I am very excited and can't wait. It is such a great time to be a Sprint customer.

I turned it on today. I have been using Google Voice for about a month, but mostly for outbound calls to Europe, and only my family has my Google phone number, but I have been loving the visual voice mail. Getting this feature on my cell number is something I'm going to love.

As regards it being a great time to be a Sprint customer: Yeah, it really is, and I'm beginning to appreciate that more and more. When I look at what I pay for unlimited data vs. what other providers charge, and when I see Sprint drop charges like this to open up outside services I feel better and better about being a Sprint customer.

[jiron2000]

This is great news! However I am still unclear about charges from calls forwarded to GV when your phone is off given this footnote from the press release:

"Although no charges will be applied for conditional call forwarding (meaning busy calls or calls not answered), some Sprint customers may incur a $0.20 per-minute charge if they choose to forward calls directly into voicemail or to another number without first allowing the call to try to reach the number and getting a busy signal/no answer. This is called unconditional call forwarding (immediate)"

[KevMeister]

This should be a sticky...and in the CDMA section of the TC Forum!

[bpdamas]

Apparently this is supposed to happen November 8th.

PPCGeeks » Blog Archive » [Exclusive] Sprint to give customers Free Call Forwarding on Nov. 8th

[donatom3]

Originally Posted by jiron2000

This is great news! However I am still unclear about charges from calls forwarded to GV when your phone is off given this footnote from the press release:

"Although no charges will be applied for conditional call forwarding (meaning busy calls or calls not answered), some Sprint customers may incur a $0.20 per-minute charge if they choose to forward calls directly into voicemail or to another number without first allowing the call to try to reach the number and getting a busy signal/no answer. This is called unconditional call forwarding (immediate)"

If you activate using *28 and not *72 it is free call forwarding. Basically what they're saying is, are you letting Sprint ring your phone first. If you're phone is off or out of service Sprint's system tries to reach your phone, sees it's not on the network and goes to voicemail immediately. What they are talking about charging for is if you have it set to always ring another phone instead of your cell phone number.