But as I continued to use the service...
- Not having MMS shouldn't be a big deal, and it isn't. Until someone wants to send you one. "Oh no, send it to my other number, sorry about that. Which number? Oh, you told me not to text there, so I deleted it." But then people start sending everything to that number, and you have to tell them which number to use for what thing. People hate this, and I don't blame them--it gets confusing.
- GV is seen as a landline, goodbye all of those cheap m2m minutes, you're now costing your friends part of their anytime minutes even though you're actually talking to them on your cell phone. This isn't a huge deal, except for those people that don't have many anytime minutes--because they mostly only call cell phones. I'd love to know whether this is a problem when you port your GV number to Sprint, but I have no idea.
- GV will sometimes drop SMS forwarding. I miss around 1 message a week (call it 1 in 1000), it'll show up on google.com/voice, but it never makes it to my phone.
- For several years, all the Google forwarding numbers (the numbers that you will get an SMS from, a unique number per contact that is generated the first time they send you a message) were in the 406 area code. This made it pretty easy to always be sure of which number you were sending to. Last year, they started assigning numbers based on any area code. This means you must be very rigid in how you add phone numbers to your contacts. It gets confusing when you have a contact with two SMS-capable numbers, now you have 4 numbers (Home, Work, Pager, Home Fax?). This is a big problem if you sync with Exchange, less so if you can assign custom number labels (Home GV, Work GV, etc.).
- Sometimes messages are delayed. Perhaps once a month I'll start getting messages delayed by an hour or so. This happens with cell carriers too (although I rarely see it on that side), so not as big of a deal as dropped messages.
- I won't even get into the lack of an API and the frustration that causes for those that choose to write apps that utilize or extend GV.
After years using GV, I now have a MicroCell at home, and I've switched everyone back to my at&t number. It's just less confusing. I've wanted to love GV so badly, but it just isn't the silver bullet that it is advertised as.
Maybe Google will fix Google Voice, but I'm not as optimistic as I used to be. :(