<p>For the <em>hassle</em> of setting it up you save ~$50 per month ($60 monthly contract minus some pay-as-you-go minutes/texts for when off campus) so that’s $1200 over a 2-year contract; spend like $400 on a wi-fi android phone and spend the other $800 on something productive rather than putting it in the pocket of Verizon’s CEO. It takes an hour to set up and then all you have to do is spend ~5 seconds ticking two boxes when you leave campus / come back to campus for which phone you want google voice to route incoming calls/texts to (to avoid your phone ringing twice on campus from itself and the wi-fi softphone).</p>
<p>I just set something up with Google Voice + Sipgate last night; my sipgate number is some random California number but that won’t display anywhere so I don’t really care. Sipgate gives you a virtual phone number; normally it requires you to pay for outgoing calls, but it gives you free incoming calls, and the way Google Voice works there’s technically no such thing as outgoing calls. I’ll put a softphone, probably Fring as that seems to be popular, on my Motorola Milestone and use that for calling purposes when on Wi-Fi; I don’t actually need 2 separate phones. </p>
<p>Although I don’t think Google Voice can reroute text messages sent from my phone when not on Wi-Fi to display my Google Voice caller ID instead of my phone one… for calling purposes I can call a google number and reroute it to a recipient so it shows my GV caller ID (and GV is integrated with Android so I don’t have to dial 2 numbers separately; there’s a call with GV function that does everything). </p>
<p>But I don’t think that works with text messages so it might be annoying giving people 2 numbers… although I might just do that anyway in case Google decides to take over the world someday.</p>