The easiest way is probably to go through an external proxy or use TOR with an exit node in a country where the call function is allowed. But this usually means slower transfer rates, which may not be good for a real-time voice function.

But what you may not know is that Google only checks the origin country when you first load up the GMail interface. It will then enable the Call Phone function and as long as you keep that window open, you can basically make calls even if you turn off the proxy or TOR.

So essentially, the steps are to:

1. Connect to a US proxy or connect to TOR and point your browser to the local polipo proxy
2. Load up GMail and ascertain that the Call Phone function can be seen
3. Click on the Call Phone button and make sure you can see the dialing pad
4. Disable the proxy settings in your browser and turn off TOR
5. Make calls as you would like

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i-Mobile (or any TOT3G reseller)

Name: TOT3G
APN: internet
MCC: 520
MNC: 15

True Move

APN: internet
Username: internet
Password: internet
MCC: 520
MNC: 99

DTAC

APN: www.dtac.co.th
MCC: 520
MNC: 18

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The problem I have with Twitter is that it’s just not scalable in some aspects. I find it horrendously difficult to track down a coherent conversation trail between 2 parties. For example, when I see an interesting tweet rebutting someone in rather strong language, the busybodycurious side of me would immediately try to track down what transpired before that tweet. More often than not, this is more of a chore than necessary and I just give up after a couple clicks.

It’s not that Twitter doesn’t have mechanisms to keep a coherent trail of tweets related to each other. When you “reply to” a tweet, be default, Twitter clients are supposed to add metadata stating that this tweet is “in reply to” another one. When viewed using a decent client, the user would be able to select an option to view the whole conversation preceding a particular tweet and find out the history of that tweet.

However, this is poorly implemented in most of the Twitter clients I’ve tried out, and I shall demonstrate how and why. Now, I have not been testing every single Twitter client under the sun, I lack the logistics to accomplish that. My experience in Twitter clients have thus far been restricted to the Twitter website, Chromed Bird, Gwibber and ChoqoK on the desktop. On my Android phone, I’ve tried out Touiteur, Twicca, Tweetcaster, the official Twitter for Android client, Seesmic and Twidroyd.

Replies

One of the worst offenders in breaking the trail of conversation is Twitter itself. Twitter has this funny dogmatic insistence that replies must begin with the handle of the person that you’re replying to. On the Twitter website, if you click on “Reply” to a person’s tweet, you will be shown a form with the person’s handle pre-populated. Just append your reply in the form and your tweet will be shown as a reply to the original tweet. However, if you remove the handle or type anything in front of the handle, your tweet will be shown as a fresh new tweet. Why? The mind boggles. However I modify the contents of my tweet, I am still replying to it. That’s the context of my tweet. The form should not affect that. Other Twitter clients, such as Chromed Bird and Touiteur, are more tolerant of this. I can modify my tweet as I wish and the “reply to” metadata will still be submitted to Twitter’s servers as I wished it to. This is one of the reasons why I avoid using official Twitter clients as much as possible.

Retweets

Retweeting is another aspect of Twitter that bugs me. For those who do not know, there are 2 styles of retweets in existence: the old and the new. The old style of retweeting consisted of quoting the entire original tweet prepended with the characters “RT”. Some time last year, Twitter rolled out their new retweet feature, where a retweet is simply the original tweet forwarded to your followers with your metadata attached (“retweeted by XXX”).

There was some amount of debate regarding which style is better but Twitter is sticking to their guns so far. A fair number of Twitter users still prefer the old style, mostly because they like the option of being able to add on their own comments to the tweet. As such, old style RTs are still available in nearly all Twitter clients save the official ones issued by Twitter.

However, as far as I know, not one single client appends “reply to” metadata when executing an old style retweet. “Why is this needed?”, you may ask. Well, in the scenario where users add on their comments to the retweet, it may breach the 140 character limit, thus forcing some creative editing to abbreviate the original tweet. Sometimes, the edit results in a severely mangled version of it such that the original meaning may be lost even. When this happens, it would be useful to be able refer back to the original tweet in a convenient fashion. Having the “reply to” metadata attached to the retweet will help a lot in this case. It just helps users form that coherent trail of tweets right back to the source. I firmly believe a large percentage of flame wars on Twitter occur due to people jumping into a debate and interpreting tweets out of context simply because they found it too difficult to read the entire conversation preceding it.

Right now, I’m still a reluctant Twitter user. I would much prefer to use Google Buzz, which is much more conducive for discussions, but the reality is that most of the people I want to follow use Twitter, and as such, I must too. I just wish Twitter and its clients would do more to help us make sense of whatever we’re reading.

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Recognizing the fact, startups all over have been setup to facilitate these discussions. Reddit and Digg are examples of websites that focus only on facilitating discussion of online articles. Disqus attempts to be an outsourced discussion engine designed to host the discussions while alleviating the need for the original website to do so. While not specifically targeted towards this end Google Buzz is another avenue for surfers to share an interesting URL with their friends and start a discussion around the article.

And there lies the problem: discussions are scattered throughout the web. Most of the time, it’s probable that the original authors of the article don’t even know such discussion exists. I, for one, am not too keen on running around trying to track down all the discussions circling what I’ve wrote. Alright, let me correct that. I’m very interested in reading the discussion, I’m just not too keen on the running around bit. It gets old, after a while.

It would be very convenient if there’s a way to aggregate these discussions together into one place, for example the URL where the article was originally posted. Technically, it seems possible. I think it’s already established that the most suitable format for pushing threads of information is via content syndication feeds. RSS or Atom feeds, to be specific. I know that Google uses Atom feeds in their Buzz API, where 3rd party applications can use the API to interact with the Buzz engine and content contained within. So, in theory, if parties such as Buzz, Digg and Reddit play nice, a blog may be able to pull in a feed of discussion from each of these sites, merge them and sort them in order to present an aggregated feed of all the discussion that has taken place on the article.

How does the blog know if discussions have been happening on other site, though? If the blog owner is required to manually hunt down these discussions, it would still be a time-consuming task. TrackBack is a framework that allows source blogs to be informed when another blog mentions one of the articles in the source blog. If we can piggyback on the TrackBack specification to add on metadata that gives enough information on how to pull the discussion feed, that would effectively automate the whole discovery process of discussions.

Obviously, this suggestion may be counter-productive to Reddit and Digg, which relies on eyeballs on their own site to monetize their efforts. However, they have to remember that they do not have original source content. They rely on 3rd party content to generate the eyeballs on their own sites. I think it’s fair enough that they allow some reciprocal exchange of data in exchange for the content that owners contribute.

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Yet, they remain a luxury or an unknown entity to the bulk of mobile phone users. Products such as the iPhone and Samsung’s flagship range of Android phones are positioned as high-end products with a corresponding price tag. Many a person whom I’ve talked to about a smartphone still give the excuse that it’s too expensive for them. Cheap smartphones, such as the China-made knock-offs that mimic popular smartphone models in terms of hardware design, are often poorly equipped in terms of software. I’ve had some hands-on experience with iPhone and Blackberry knock-offs and I’ve come to the conclusion that they simply cannot be labelled as smartphones due to the lack of the software features expected from a smartphone.

This barrier to creating cheap smartphones stems from the fact that a good mobile operating system is not a trivial matter. Many smaller phone manufacturers just do not have the resources to create their own operating systems from scratch. Enter operating systems that are provided by third parties. For some time, we have had several independent entities providing generic operating systems for mobile devices. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile is probably one of the earliest such operating systems. Unfortunately, due to the fact that licensing for Windows Mobile is a significant cost factor and that its phones were relatively poorly implemented compared to other smartphone vendors, it never reached the market penetration needed to turn smartphones into a commodity.

Enter OpenSource then. Having an OpenSource operating system may constitute significant cost savings for any phone manufacturer hoping to enter the smartphone market. There are basically two strong contenders in this category: Symbian and Android. Symbian has had a relatively long history and is currently used mainly in Nokia phones and by a handful of other manufacturers. At this point of time, however, it is rapidly losing market share and its future is frankly in doubt. Any phone manufacturer looking to integrate an OpenSource operating system into their device would probably have strong doubts in its future viability.

Enter Android. A product of the search behemoth Google and a critical component of the Open Handset Alliance, it has recently been seeing huge gains in terms of market growth and interest from phone manufacturers. It already has major manufacturers such as Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson backing it and manufacturing devices running it (i.e. not vaporware). However, as I said earlier, the current crop of Android devices tend to be positioned as high to middle tier products.

Enter the low cost manufacturers. I’ve been reading reports of more and more small phone manufacturers getting into the Android game:

• CSL, a Malaysian company known more for their range of Blackberry knock-offs, has recently come out with their first Android model.
• After the Apple iPad was launched, there was predictably a flurry of Chinese knock-offs, just like there was for the iPhone. But this time round, the knock-offs were running Android!!!

This is a significant step. While previously, cheap mobile devices often meant crappy software loaded inside, with Android, what you’re getting is probably just as good as you can get with any other manufacturer. Sure, you’ll probably be limited by crappy hardware, but the basic features of what I expect of a smartphone will be there. I do not need a top-of-the-line AMOLED or SLCD screen to view my calendar. I do not need a Snapdragon or Hummingbird CPU to check my email. All I need for it is to be decently made and cheap.

If I were to lose my Nexus One right now, I probably won’t be able to afford to replace it with a new top-of-the-line gadget. What this meant previously, was that I needed to downgrade myself to a non-smartphone and tough it up until I can afford one. However, with cheaper options running Android, I can switch to a lesser known brand and have basically most of the features I’m used to until I save up enough for one of ‘em dual core, dedicated GPU devices that are purportedly coming soon. I probably won’t be able to play Asphalt 5 anymore, but that’s not too much of a sacrifice. I can live without a few games, but I cannot live without having instant access to my emails.

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The Dream’s shelf life has been extended time and again, thanks to the efforts of Steve Kondik and his cohort. Their CyanogenMod releases have time and again ensured that the Dream is kept relevant, despite the dozens of new Android models we see announced every week. As of July 11th, the Dream has been given yet another new lease on life with the release candidate announcement of CyanogenMod 6, the CyanogenMod community’s port of Android 2.2 (Froyo).

I was so eager to get my Dream updated to CM6 RC1 that I rushed over yesterday evening to his office and squatted outside the building doing the upgrade. At this time, my Dream was running CyanogenMod 5.0.7. I didn’t have a chance to upgrade it to 5.0.8 as I’d been too busy to meet my brother for a while. Turned out that this caused a fair amount of drama during my upgrading efforts.

I’ve been using ROM Manager for the past month or so and it really has been a time-saver for me. Naturally, the moment I laid hands on the Dream, I downloaded ROM Manager from Market and installed it. Using ROM Manager, I installed the ClockWorkMod recovery image, overwriting the AmonRA recovery image that was previously installed. I then proceeded to download CM6 RC1 and the bundled Google apps FRF91 using ROM Manager.

At this point of time, I was smugly smiling to myself at how cool this process was. There I was, literally squatting at the sidewalk, doing an OS upgrade on my phone over 3G with no need to hook it up to a laptop or PC. That’s why I’ve said before that one of the reasons I love Android is that it’s a full-fledged peer to a PC and not just a slave to it.

After downloading the necessary files, I was prompted to select whether a backup and/or wipe should be done or not. ROM Manager then rebooted the Dream into recovery mode to complete the upgrade. Or at least that was what it was supposed to do. 3 minutes after rebooting, I was staring in alarm at the Dream stuck at the bootloader splash image. It just would not go into recovery anymore. I rebooted the phone normally and found that it still could boot into CyanogenMod 5.0.7 with no apparent issues.

After some panicky checks on the Internet, I found that CyanogenMod 5.0.7 has problems writing a recovery image, as was warned in AmonRA’s release page. Suffice to say, if you’re running 5.0.7, you cannot use it to flash your recovery image. Meh to me for not reading up adequately before doing the upgrade.

I resolved the problem by re-flashing AmonRA using fastboot as documented here. Just boot the phone into fastboot mode by holding the camera and power button simultaneously, hook it up to a laptop (yes, this is where a PC or laptop is required) and run the command “fastboot flash recovery <path to recovery image>“. Huge sighs of relief all around when I saw the familiar recovery menu items upon rebooting.

So, I proceeded to manually flash CM6 RC1 and FRF91. At first, I did not do a wipe, hoping that the upgrade from CM5 to CM6 would no necessitate this. No dice. When I rebooted the phone, I found that the whole Google account sync module was not working and I could not even add a Google account! Oh well, didn’t really have high hopes for this anyway. So I wiped the phone and then everything worked fine. It’s definitely a pain to get the phone back into an operating condition you’re used to after a wipe so I really hope that something can be done about it in the final release. I have no idea whether it’s technically possible or not so I won’t complain, I’ll just hope.

My impressions on the Dream running CM6 / Froyo: it’s noticeably faster than Eclair, but really, don’t get your hopes up too high. The Dream’s problem is with its lack of RAM. It has only 96MB of available RAM compared to 386MB on my Nexus One. The moment you switch applications, the odds of it having to be loaded from internal memory or SD card is very high and that imposes an overhead on performance. This will happen no matter what kind of swap to SD card hacks are done and it’s really pointless to hope for more. I’m just glad that my Dream is able to run the latest and greatest software when the manufacturer has long lost any interest in keeping it updated.

Kudos to the CyanogenMod team for their great work. Given that Gingerbread seems to be designed for higher CPU speeds than ever, I’m not sure whether we’ll see a CM7 for the Dream but one can always dream, no?

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NOTE: As the “alpha” tag indicates, this is not production quality stuff yet. I don’t even know how well my phone is working now after I installed CM6, so I’m hesitating to even use the work “upgrade” and instead I just say “migrate”. Read the release notes in CyanogenMod’s forums carefully and use your discretion.

What I started out with:

1. A Nexus One phone.
2. A working stock rooted Froyo installation.
3. A bunch of user level applications, both from Market and self-installed APKs.
4. Donate version of Titanium Backup.
5. ClockWorkMod Recovery Image (but I’m pretty sure AmonRa would work just as well)
6. ADW Launcher installed from Market.
7. SMS Backup & Restore installed from Market.

My steps:

1. Downloaded the CM6 binary and Google Apps zip distro from the CyanogenMod release page.
2. Made use of the opportunity to remove some unused apps to reduce complexity and risk.
3. Moved all apps installed on SD card back to the phone. I just didn’t want to risk having problems recovering those applications after the migration. To do this, just go to Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications -> On SD Card and go into each application listed there and move them back to the phone.
4. Went into ADWSettings and backup launcher configurations to SD card. After that, I uninstalled ADW Launcher. This is because CM6 comes with its own mix of ADW Launcher and I did not want Froyo’s automatic restoration of apps to clash with ADW Launcher.
5. Ran Titanium Backup and backed up all user apps and data.
6. Backed up all SMS using SMS Backup & Restore.
7. Selectively backed up certain system apps, namely “Android Keyboard” for me, for my custom dictionary. You really have to use your discretion here. You can try to backup all system apps, but I don’t know how well that’ll work.
8. Rebooted into ClockWorkMod Recovery Image.
9. Did a full nandroid backup.
10. Installed CM6 and Google Apps zip distro.
11. Did a full wipe.
12. Rebooted the phone.
13. Did Google account sign-in.
14. Waited for all apps that I previously downloaded from Market to be restored automatically. There will be a notification at the end of this process.
15. Fired up Titanium Backup and restored all user data (not app) for applications that are downloaded from Market.
16. Restored app and data for applications not downloaded from Market (self installed APKs).
17. Went to Settings -> ADWLauncher and restored ADWLauncher settings from SD card. This didn’t work for widgets; I had to re-add widgets after this but my app icons on the home screen and other settings were generally restored properly.
18. Restored all SMS using SMS Backup & Restore.

Done. As of right now, my Nexus One seems to be in working condition. Not sure what bugs will turn up but digging up bugs is the main purpose of this exercise, isn’t it?

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My perspective on using the Android isn’t really so much of a comparison, mainly because I’ve never actually owned an iPhone before. But I still like, even love, the HTC G1/Dream that I first bought and the Nexus One that replaced it.

When I first got my G1, I thought it was the ugliest, nay, fugliest phone ever. But I chose it still because, being my first touchscreen phone, I wanted a physical QWERTY keyboard to help me ease into the new environment. Back then, Android didn’t even have a soft keyboard yet (Android 1.0). I used it and was happy with it for a while. Didn’t like some quirks, such as the limitation on only one GMail account to sync with and the fact that I had to flip out the keyboard to do the simplest of typing tasks.

The Cupcake (Android 1.5) came out and I got my soft keyboard. I found myself enjoying the keyboard very much but didn’t like the fact that Cupcake made my G1 (with its severe hardware limitations) run as slow as molasses. After reading around, I realized that 3rd parties were actually taking the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source code and releasing their own home-brewed rooted releases. So I selected the most popular 3rd party (CyanogenMod), read up on a couple of tutorials, rooted the phone and installed CyanogenMod. And then the world started opening up.

Immediately off the bat, I got tethering and A2DP, plus CyanogenMod’s speed screamed on my G1. And we got our Donut (Android 1.6) upgrade earlier than any one else waiting for official OTA updates too. When Google Navigation was introduced, it was locked to everyone but those using it in USA, but some cool dude by the name of Brut hacked it into supporting the rest of the world. That was really nice and enabled me to enjoy the full benefits of Android without having to be in the states. But at the back of my head, I was always thinking “this is nice, but I wouldn’t recommend it to my non-techie friends; I really wouldn’t want to end up being their tech support for this”.

However, at the same time, there is one thing that I would point out as an Android, even at this time: the fact that an Android phone is a complete peer to the PC and not a slave to it in any way. The iPhone is a peer in most aspects, but for major work such as upgrading of the OS, I believe you still need hook it up to a PC with iTunes installed. Unfortunately, this is a no-go for me as I’m a Linux user and iTunes is not available for that platform. With Android, I download the update (whether OTA if you’re not rooted or as a zip file if you are) and flash it with no necessity for it to be hooked up to a PC whatsoever. My experience with Apple devices is limited to the iPod that I bought for my girlfriend, and for every OS update thus far, I’ve had to hook it up to iTunes.

Then, the Eclair (Android 2.0 and 2.1) devices came out. By that time, I felt comfortable enough with the soft keyboard so I ordered the Nexus One instead of the Motorola Milestone (the GSM version of the Droid). And when I got my Nexus One, that’s when something “magical” (as Jobs likes to put it) happened. I merely switched off my G1, switched on the Nexus One, signed in to my Google account and:

1. My contacts were populated
2. My mails were populated
3. My calendar was populated
4. All the applications I was using on my G1 were installed automatically

It took all of 5 minutes for the migration from one Android phone to another. No need for any hooking up to a PC, backup software or anything! Really, I could do this all day long. No matter what phone you’re using, you have to admit that this is really one heckuva cool feature.

Now that leads to one double-edged sword of using any Android phone: you need to buy into Google’s vision of the cloud if you’re going to derive the best of the platform. This means that you need to have a Google account, use their mail services, their calendar for your organizational work etc etc. I have a friend who insisted that his smartphone must sync from his MS Outlook and not from any server-side service. He got a Milestone and to date, he’s still complaining that the included software to sync to Outlook isn’t working very well. I sympathize, but I don’t think he should have gotten an Android phone in the first place. The desktop sync software was probably developed by Motorola themselves and I can hardly expect the manufacturer of a phone with a shelf life of less than 2 years to do a good job of it compared to the core developer of the OS whose aim is to make the best OS it can in the long run.

But Google just isn’t interested in making the phone a slave to the desktop. In their vision, the desktop and your phone are peers, and both of them are slaves to the cloud. Google’s cloud, to be specific. Now, whether you buy into that vision or not is a personal decision. I made mine.

Now, back to the Nexus One. By this time, I had found a community of Android users in Kuala Lumpur. And get this, over half of them are not particularly tech-inclined. Most of them just like playing their games (there isn’t many of them, but the size is growing), switching home screen launcher apps to see which fits their usage profile better, using it to increase their productivity and getting around town with Navigation.

Personally, I’m constantly watching out for the day when Android becomes full-featured enough to satisfy my needs without having to root the device. As l33t as I feel by having a rooted phone, I’m very conscious of its downsides (would you pass your rooted Android phone to a toddler to play around with? I did, and I had to restore the bloody phone after he managed to wipe out half my system apps). Froyo (Android 2.2) made a couple of long strides towards this end. I love the inbuilt tethering, and as soon as they sort out the installation of applications on the SD card, we’re really almost there.

And more importantly, I can do all this and enjoy using my Android phone without having to put down any iPhone user. You can enjoy your phone, I’m definitely loving mine.

Oh, and do note that I’m ignoring all carrier-related factors in my evaluation. I don’t live in the states, and the fact that stateside users have to factor in carrier concerns when choosing a phone is just an indictment of how screwed up your telco industry is and that’s unrelated to the phone. Over here in Malaysia and Singapore (and probably many other countries as well), we choose our phones and network separately. Telco contracts in exchange for subsidies are available, but mostly optional. Life is just so much better for it.

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There are actually numerous tutorials and howtos giving tips on how to sign up for Google Voice from outside USA, but quite a few of them are outdated and most are lacking in details. Most of what I’m writing here is basically expanding on the information given in a help page in wifitalk.ca.

Essentially, when you sign up for Google Voice, Google will provide you with a USA phone number. However, this number can be best be described as a “virtual” phone number. It is not meant to replace your current phone number. When you sign up, you will need to provide a USA phone number which will be used as forwarding number. What this means is that when someone calls your Google Voice number, Google will route the call to your own phone number. It’s essential to understand this: your Google Voice phone number is virtually useless on its own. You still need an actual phone number for it to function. Honestly, Google’s help pages do a rather poor job of explaining this upfront so when Alfred and myself realized this, we couldn’t help but feel disappointed.

The steps to be taken are essentially the following:

1. Get a USA proxy or setup TOR with exit nodes forced to USA IP addresses only. I won’t go into details about this here. Maybe I’ll put up a separate howto, but in the meantime, there should be plenty of search hits if you Google for it.
2. Sign up a SIP account. I signed up for IPTel.
3. Get a free phone number from IPKall, which will be routed to your IPTel SIP account.
4. Set up your SIP phone with your IPTel signon information. Here, I’m using Android’s SIPDroid.
5. Set up and verify your Google Voice account with your IPKall phone number.

Sign up for a IPTel SIP account

1. Point your browser to the IPTel registration page.
2. Fill up the form. Most of the fields should be easy to understand except for “phone”. I felt a bit confused by this but turned out that they just want to collect your phone number. Just key in any phone number that belongs to you. I have yet to be contacted by them at my number so far.
3. Submit the form and you should have your SIP account.

Sign up for a IPKall phone number

1. Make sure that your USA proxy or TOR is configured correctly when you do this. You won’t even be able to open the registration page otherwise.
2. Visit the IPKall registration page.
3. Choose the account type “SIP”.
4. Select an area code. All of them are from Washington State so it should not matter much to us non-Americans which one we choose.
5. Key in your IPTel user ID in the “SIP Phone Number” field. You must not key in the “@iptel.org” postfix.
6. Key in “sip.iptel.org” in the “SIP Proxy” field.
7. Key in your email address.
8. Key in a password for your IPKall account.
9. Key in the Captcha code and submit the form.
10. You’ll get an email with your phone number in a matter of minutes. Note down this number.

Set up SIPDroid with your IPTel account

1. On your Android phone, go to Market and install SIPDroid. If you’re using a Barcode Scanner, you can get the QR code here.
2. Set up SIPDroid and go to Settings -> SIP Account Settings.
3. Key in your IPTel user ID without the “@iptel.org” postfix in the “Authorization Username” field.
4. Key in your password.
5. Key in “iptel.org” in the “Server” field.
6. Leave the rest of the fields as they are.
7. If your Android phone is on WiFi, SIPDroid should attempt to connect immediately. You will know that you are connected when you see a green dot in your Android notification status bar.
8. If you are on 3G or Edge, go to Settings -> Call Options and check on the “Use 3G” and “Use EDGE” boxes accordingly. You should see the green dot then. If you see a red dot, it means that there was a problem and you should check the status error.
9. Once this is done, you should be able to receive calls to your IPKall number on your Android phone (as long as SIPDroid is signed on). Try this out by calling your US number from another phone. If you hear your phone ringing, you’re set.

Register and verify your IPKall number in Google Voice

1. Fire up your browser and sign on to Google Voice using your Google account. Once again, your USA proxy or TOR must be active.
2. During your first login, Google Voice will ask you to select a GV phone number. Key in an area code and Google will display a selection of numbers available. Choose one that you like and proceed.
3. Google Voice will then prompt you for a forwarding number. Key in your IPKall number here.
4. Now here’s where things got a bit sticky for me. IPKall numbers are recycled if they are inactive for 30 days. The IPKall number that you get may very well be a recycled number. If the IPKall number that you got has previously been registered with Google Voice, Google Voice will not allow you to re-use that number. When that happens, you have nothing else to do but to login to IPKall using your phone number and password and clicking on the Cancel link and then registering another number with the same details. Then you will need to register your new phone number with Google Voice. Repeat until Google Voice accepts your number. I got mine through on the 2nd attempt.
5. Google Voice will then inform you that you need to verify the phone number. You will be give a 2 digit number. Click on the “Call My Phone” button and your SIPDroid should ring. Answer the call and pull out the number pad to key in the 2 digit verification number. Once your phone has been verified, your registration will be complete.

So, was it worth it?

Up till now, I’ve yet to really use the service. I’ll post up more findings as I learn more, but right now, I fail to see how Google Voice beats Skype.

The wifitalk article provides other methods of getting your phone number. But the other methods such as using SkypeIn needs money and given the US$’s relatively strong value compared to Malaysia’s local currency, it may not come cheap.

It would be nice if we can discard our original phone numbers once we sign up for Google Voice but this is not so. However, Google had recently bought up the Gizmo5 SIP service and it’s quite possible that it will be added in Google Voice’s feature list. That may serve to relieve ourselves of the need to signup for a separate SIP account.

Lastly, it would be great if Google Voice were to allow forwarding to international phone numbers. I’m in no position to say how easy or hard this is, but it certainly sounds easier than for Google to start giving out Malaysian phone numbers.

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I’ve also mirrored the file here (40MB MD5: e52c58021ffa31e8e87d1e9e7d7fdb66) since he allowed it.

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