The following I got from Yahoo News on this page linked here, but couple things first. After reading about it I signed up on this page here and that took almost all of about a minute. After getting my number Google called my home phone to test the call forwarding feature so that people can call my Google number and if I want to I can just answer it on my home phone. Then they offered a link through a pop-up window to see a vid on the features. Here is that link too, now I got my free phone and I'm hooked.
Enjoy the article, use the links, get the phone and save some money.
Google plugs free PC-to-phone calling into e-mail
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO – Google Inc. is adding a free e-mail feature that may persuade more people to cut the cords on their landline phones.
The service unveiled Wednesday enables U.S. users of Google's Gmail service to make calls from microphone-equipped computers to telephones virtually anywhere in the world.
All calls in the U.S. and Canada will be free through at least the end of the year. That undercuts the most popular PC-to-phone service, Skype, which charges 1.2 cents to 2.1 cents per minute for U.S. calls. It also threatens to overshadow another free PC-to-phone calling service called MagicTalk that was just introduced by VocalTec Communications Ltd.
Skype, Google and many other services have been offering free computer-to-computer calling for years.
Google hopes to make money on its PC-to-phone service by charging 2 cents or more per minute for international calls. The international rates will vary widely, sometimes even within the same country. Google posted a rate chart at https://www.google.com/voice/b/0/rates.
People also will be able to receive calls on their PC if they obtain a free phone number from Google or already have one.
The phone numbers and technology for the new PC-calling service are being provided by Google Voice, a telecommunications hub that the company has been trying to expand. It had been an invitation-only service until two months ago when Google Voice began accepting all number requests.
Google disclosed last year that it had assigned about 1.4 million phone numbers through its Voice service, which can field calls made to a person's home, mobile or office number. Craig Walker, a Google product manager who helped develop Voice, said the service has expanded its reach since then, but he wouldn't provide specifics.
Besides planting Voice's technology into Gmail, Google also plans to promote the service by setting up red phone booths at universities and airports scattered across the United States. People will be able to make free calls from the booths to U.S. and Canadian numbers and save on international calls.
Google also plans to enable people to transfer, or "port," their existing home or mobile phone to Voice to widen the service's appeal. Walker said Wednesday that flexibility will be available soon.
The PC-to-phone calling option initially is being offered only to consumers who have accounts on Google's Web-based e-mail, but the company left open the possibility that it will be expanded to the millions of businesses and government agencies that rely on Gmail as part of an applications suite that includes other programs such as word processing.
The added competition comes at an inopportune time for Skype S.A., the Luxembourg-based company that recently filed plans for an initial public offering of stock. Skype has 560 million registered users, including 8.1 million paying customers (most people use the free PC-to-PC service). After four years under the ownership of eBay Inc., Skype was sold to a group of private investors last November for about $2 billion. The company has been doing well since the sale, earning $13 million on revenue of $406 million during the first half of this year.
As always my post is just a cheap imitation of the professionally done post and I recommend you go to the original [here] and see this formatted the way it was intended.
Follow-up:
Yes I have tried the Google phone app and "yes it is fantastic", but it is just a little more complicated than expected
I'll try to explaine...
I first thought it would be just another version of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), but instead it was sort of a marriage between internet phone, land -line & cell phone technology.
I live in a Village (not even a poor excuse of a town) up amongst the canyons in the desert region we choose to call "Nebraska". It's a fairly wealthy area carved out of society that at first glance has all the bells and whistles, all the little extra's that the rest of our society enjoys. What I have noticed though is it has much less. Everything here I have found to be partial to slightly less or even in many cases just a poor imitation of what the rest of those in out nation have just grown to take for granted.
Our internet service, our cell phone service, our governing agencies, all of those things just as just about all the rest of our services are nothing but poor representations of what we would expect to be. Our cellular service is like the rest of it out here. It reminds me of a cheap toy that comes to you out of the package broken and the best they can offer you is "we'ell it's betterin nothin, ain'it?".
So that leaves me with only one service which is only one land line because my personality is "Just keep your crap and talk to me when you've got it working", I don't even bother with the rest of their crap.
Back on topic... The features of this service are different in that you can program in your home phone, your cell phone number and your business phone along with other numbers and through it you can both send and receive phone calls from any of those services. You can also receive voice mail as an email transcribed from each if you should miss a call.
LOL, I however can only use the land line end of it.
First I open up my Google phone page. Then I type in your phone number, then I select on which phone I wish to call you from and then I select the call button. I select "call from home". The computer then calls my phone and it rings. I then answer it to hear it ringing on the other end and when the person answers I hear them and we talk just as if I placed the call from home.
Pretty simple, huh? It is except this time I'm calling you for free and that's nice.
I haven't tried it yet but I believe I can add other phones temporarily to it for use under other circumstances like when I'm traveling. Like when I'm on my way to Massachusetts to visit my family and while I'm there visiting.
This for me would mean no more lost access to people when I'm out or away and that I like.
