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Ear­lier this week, I sent email to fam­ily and friends, and posted a note on Face­book, break­ing the news. After a good run with Google Voice, almost two years I think, we are split­ting up. Don’t fret. It was an ami­ca­ble split. In fact, we’re still friends, though, and may even come back together to work on my pho­tog­ra­phy project.

Jokes aside, it was a tough deci­sion for me to jet­ti­son my Google Voice num­ber in favor of my under­ly­ing Ver­i­zon Wire­less dig­its. What made me switch, you ask? Well, there were a num­ber of con­nec­tiv­ity issues that were nag­ging me, but the straw that broke my camel’s back was, sur­pris­ingly, no MMS. (pic­ture and video mes­sag­ing for the unini­ti­ated). So often, peo­ple would say, “Did you see the pic­ture I sent you?” Uhh…nope, I would reply. For a while, I the dots were not con­nect­ing for me. Oh…you sent me a pic­ture in a text mes­sage. That’s why I didn’t get it. Now, for a while I sim­ply thought, “Why not just email the pic­ture to me?” It can be done with smart­phones or basic fea­ture phones. Of course, that’s ask­ing the sender to remem­ber my spe­cial, lim­ited, Google Voice MMS needs. After catch­ing up with a friend on Mon­day at a base­ball game, only to learn that I was miss­ing all the pic­tures he sent via text that I decided the nov­elty of hav­ing one num­ber that can reach me any­where, and free text mes­sag­ing, was not worth miss­ing what peo­ple had to share. While it may seem triv­ial, the lack of sup­port for MMS started to become a drag.

Again, my deci­sion was not quite a knee-jerk reac­tion on Mon­day. For a cou­ple of months, I was expe­ri­enc­ing some con­nec­tiv­ity issues with Google Voice. Far too often, I would bang out a text mes­sage in a hurry only to find that the mes­sage did not go through. That’s not all. I also noticed an increase of missed calls. My phone would sit silent, and then I would get an email noti­fy­ing me that I missed a call. Wait! What? My phone was sit­ting right next to me. Why didn’t it ring? Now, if this hap­pened every once and a while, I would not be phased. Unfor­tu­nately, the fre­quency of missed calls had risen to an unac­cept­able level. Oh…the voice­mail tran­scrip­tion is ter­ri­ble, I mean really bad. How­ever, I do like the visual voice­mail dis­play, allow­ing you to skip to spe­cific mes­sages quickly.

I don’t want to paint the pic­ture that every­thing with Google Voice was bad. I loved that I can sit at my com­puter, and the phone rings on my desk­top. Or, con­versely, I can make calls from my com­puter, or any­where else I am, and the per­son I’m call­ing sees my Google Voice num­ber on his/her Caller ID. That’s pretty cool. My wife has found Google Voice par­tic­u­larly use­ful for her busi­ness. She has two lines. For her, hav­ing a Google Voice num­ber means that she can have the main num­ber answered no mat­ter where her staff is sit­ting. Fol­low­ing that exam­ple, I think that I will retain my Google Voice num­ber for my pho­tog­ra­phy business.

If you’ve been sit­ting on the fence about get­ting a Google Voice num­ber, please don’t let my rant dis­uade you. Google Voice can be a great tool. Just ask your­self whether send­ing and receiv­ing pic­tures and video in text mes­sages is important.

Side­bar: I am really sur­prised that Sprint paired up with Google Voice, when it’s widely known that there is no sup­port for MMS. From what I’ve been read­ing, a num­ber of Sprint cus­tomers are not happy about this miss­ing feature.

If you move around a lot, or have a bunch of dif­fer­ent phone num­bers, Google Voice can really be great. The draw for me was only hav­ing to give peo­ple one num­ber and they can reach me any­where (at my dis­cre­tion, of course). Fun­nily enough, though, most of us have our mobile phones with us all the time. It’s a ques­tion of con­ve­nience. Some­times, it’s more con­ve­nient to have the mobile phone tucked in a bag, and have calls ring in my office. It’s a lit­tle more dis­crete to have the office phone to your ear than your mobile phone. I would be remiss if I didn’t share a ben­e­fit that a num­ber of my sin­gle friends enjoy with Google Voice, par­tic­u­larly women. I’ve heard a num­ber of peo­ple say that they give out their Google Voice num­bers when the meet peo­ple. It serves as a screen­ing device. If they become inter­ested, or more con­nected, the per­son gets “the real” num­ber. It’s actu­ally makes a lot of sense to me.

So, hope­fully I didn’t turn you around if you had your heart set on pick­ing up a Google Voice num­ber. I’ve nudged sev­eral friends to get GV num­bers over the years, and wouldn’t ask them to join me on revert­ing to their wire­less carrier-assigned num­bers. If you have ques­tions about Google Voice, I am more than happy to answer them.