Quote from: 7Priest7 on January 13, 2014, 11:09:04 PM
Concerning the 39.99 a year, worthless.
I would rather obihai focus on updating their systems to work post xmpp removal,
instead they focus on brokering more expensive than GV deals.
From what I've read, Google doesn't really have much interest in opening up whatever protocol they'll be using for Hangouts (which replaces Chat). It will be interesting to see, but Google has been against third party products using Google Voice/Chat the way they've been using it - my guess is that in beefing up the Hangout infrastructure, a nice side effect for them was to stop supporting XMPP.
And I wasn't all that impressed with the call quality of GV. I had GV -> Callcentric -> Obi for incoming CNAM, and obi -> GV for outgoing calls. In all my calls, I had a walkie-talkie effect - there was a noticeable 1 or 2 second delay and we'd end up talking over each other all the time. It got so bad that someone would call and my wife would call them back on her cell phone.
When I took GV out completely and used a pay per minute CallCentric plan, that went away completely. Likewise with Obivoice (the $60 for two year unlimited/e911 thingy that is evidently not what the topic of this thread is about).
So, I'd agree. Unless Obi brokers a free service with better quality than GV, I'm happy paying $2.50/month with a third party provider and leave ObiHai to improve the hardware. But I think they are kinda roped into this because most of their "advertisement" has not been "The Obi devices are powerful little VoIP adapters" (which they are), it has been "Use the Obi to get free phone service with Google Voice!" Expectations and impressions trump reality in many cases, and I think this is one of those cases - people think that Obi only works with GV - go and read the Amazon reviews sometime. I applaud the people who post reviews there who try to set people straight, but I'm afraid that it falls on deaf ears.