What is Reddit's opinion of Talkatone?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

In my experience, 3G is not enough to sustain a hassle free voip call, and you're out of luck with 4G unless you live in a major city and plan to never leave its coverage. I tried it before with Fring on a Verizon Windows Mobile phone. Voice quality under the best circumstances will have glitches and slowdown/desyncing. People on the other end will frequently ask you to repeat yourself. That's assuming you're standing still. Data throughput while you move around tends to be worse than when you're in one place.

I have a very nice prepaid plan with unlimited calls to one number that I've tied into Google Voice. Unfortunately, it no longer exists. If I lost that plan right now and were forced to re-evaluate my options, I'd get a T-Mobile prepaid data SIM with a used iPhone or Android phone. They have an internet Daypass option that costs $1.50/day only during the days you use it, and you can also purchase blocks of data.

Use the wifi on your smartphone to make free calls when you're around a hotspot. If you get the iPhone option, I suggest Talkatone. In a pinch, you can use the minutes on the phone to make voice calls.

Alternatively, this should work with any national provider as they all use pay-per-use data now. Just use the mifi instead of a SIM on CDMA carriers for all your data needs.

1. stop whining about your bill.
   
2. cancel your phone.

I'm serious. I have been living phone-free for almost two years now. It can be annoying at times, but is also very freeing. I have an ipod touch and the newer models come with a mic and can be used like a phone (within wi-fi range). Look up Talkatone and Google Voice. Save Money. I save about $70-$90 a month compared to people that have iphones (or in your case over $700).

Awesome, great explanations and links.

So here's what it's come down to. At the moment, I rarely use my phone for calls. It's almost primarily texting. I make a call with my cell phone around one or two times a week.

Secondarily, it's not important for me to be able to make or receive calls or texts while driving. And that's pretty much the only time when I'm not around WiFi. I constantly have a WiFi signal.

Therefore, I want to know if it's possible to not have ANY phone plan at all, and still be able to both make and RECEIVE calls and texts.

Right now I know of 3 things that potentially allow me to do this:

• Google Voice
• GrooveIP
• Talkatone

I'm not sure exactly how these things operate, but I've been reading a lot about them and I have a few questions that maybe you can answer. Keep in mind that my main goal is to escape a monthly bill. One-time fees are okay.

> As far as I can tell making a phone call is easy, and sending and receiving texts is easy. The only problem arises when I want to receive a call. GrooveIP's FAQ says: "NOTE: To receive incoming calls you MUST go into your Google Voice account and forward calls to Google Chat." What does that mean? Does that mean that the incoming call is converted to text?

next question:

> If I already have a phone number with AT&T, can I connect that number to Google Voice and KEEP it even when my contract ends with AT&T? Even if not, will the new number that I get through Google Voice be a constant, unchanging number that people can call and go straight to my phone?

last question:

> What about a SIM card? Will a phone like the LG Nexus 4 work without a SIM card, and how does my Google Voice phone number relate to that SIM card?

Sorry for the length of these questions. I really appreciate your helpfulness and kindness in answering these.

try talkatone, looks like a superb alternative. it's out on ios and they got an android beta. i bought grooveip during their sale, but refunded it since i don't live in the US. i was about to set up US number, but decided it's not worth spending money on, if i'm not actually there. still, such a cool concept.

If you check their FAQ

>Talkatone relies on iOS4 VoIP backgrounding in order to receive messages and calls while Talkatone runs in background, so you need to have a multitasking-capable device. At this moment the following devices support multitasking:

> iPhone 3GS > iPhone 4 > iPod Touch 3rd generation > iPod Touch 4th generation >iPad

>Note: We noticed that jailbreak may interfere with multi-tasking. We suspect that some jailbroken devices may disable WiFi/3G access if you send Talkatone to background.

http://www.talkatone.com/faq.html

So...are you jailbroken?

I just recently got the obihai that the other redditor recommended. it is pretty awesome. Super easy set up.You can get android and iphone apps that connect to your device also. There is also a iphone google talk sip-client here you can use it over 3g also but the call quality can be sucky depending on connection speed. Google has stated the free calls last until 2012 so i would imagine this includes sip. I am not aware of any news as to their pricing structure afterwards but I imagine it would be pretty reasonable.