Will Google Voice do in Microsoft's My Phone?
When we learned of GrandCentral's relaunch as Google Voice, one of our first thoughts was, "Uh, oh. The carriers aren't going to be happy about this."
But let's turn a little closer to home, shall we? What about Microsoft's fledgling My Phone service, which currently is in beta testing. Yeah. Feel the light bulb click on.
Quick review: My Phone syncs your phone's contacts, text messages, calendar appointments, tasks, photos, videos, music and documents to the Microsoft cloud. They're then available on the Web. You can also go from the Web back to your phone. Contacts and calendar sync require use of your one Exchange ActiveSync connection.
Google Voice? Save for not syncing photos, music and documents, it's got My Phone beat across the board. Check out our previous post for everything that's coming. But it's not a sync service. It just is. All of your data [SMS, phone calls, voicemail] pings it first, then hits your phone. Yeah, you're going to have to give yourself up to The Google to take full advantage of Voice. Some of us already have sold our souls given in taken full advantage of the services Google offers. [Edit: If you're going to be using Google Voice, you're already going to have a lot of your PIM data in their cloud, right?]
And, at least for yours truly, here's the kicker: It'll be possible (with a little third-party help - thanks, Seven!) to totally enter the Google cloud and still have Exchange ActiveSync left over for business matters.
So what say you, fair readers? We realize it's not quite an apples-to-apples fight. But does the prospect of Google Voice on your device make My Phone a non-starter?
