phone Archives - Planet Geek!

Google Voice: A slow slide into disfunctionality

I’ve been a Google Voice user for over a decade. The service has been reliable, steadfast, and for the most part, works as expected.

But as with so many Google products, I feel Voice is slowly going down hill, and each day I find another thing that is not working properly, or is simply unfathomable in it’s behaviour.

Lets run down the challenges facing Voice now.

Integration with chat on mobile devices
Google has a dreadful track record when it comes to chat apps / communication. Hangouts, Allo, Chat, Messages, heck even Plus – each of these lived at some point. Some died, some moved, some… we’re just not sure what’s going on. Until Google figures out their messaging strategy and actually executes it, we’re all going to be fidgeting.

Voice originally integrated with Hangouts, but that integration has long since gone by the wayside. Now the only way to use google voice with IM is either in the Voice App on the phone, or via https://voice.google.com/.

The web app
Okay, so there’s https://voice.google.com – a relatively useful webpage for sending//receiving calls, texts, etc. But… it’s a TERRIBLE application. I feel it was written once in 2013 and basically hasn’t been improved since. Some examples:

Contacts integration is dreadful. Trying to find or update a contact in the page is an exercise in frustration.

The Keypad popup… does not allow keyboard input. One of the niceties about making phone calls from your desktop SHOULD be the ability to, you know, use the keyboard. But if you’re in a voice menu on a call, you cannot use your keyboard to push phone buttons. You have to click on the keypad on the screen

In the text chat, image handling is completely useless. No paste, no simple “Send this file”, and even when you do send something, it may simply fail with “Not sent” – more on this in a moment. But at it’s basic level, here’s how to send a photo / pic in voice:

Find your image / pic / whatever you want to sendSave a copy of that image to your desktop

Open the voice app and click the little photo icon in the send boxYou’d think you could paste an image here. You’d be wrong. Click Select photos from your computer

Find the photo you were just editing, double-click on that. This ‘uploads’ the photo to… something. Not google photos – something specific to Voice?

Select the photo. Now it’s a thumbnail in your send box

Click send

It probably won’t send. You’ll get the intensely informative and useful error “Not sent”. That’s it!

For some reason, Voice does not support RCS – the Rich Communication Service. You know the one that Google actively championed.

The Voice website is apparently very unstable on Firefox, and has been for several years. No fix has happened.

(Added 11/12) Oh just found another issue. The website app does not support vcards. You know, when someone sends you their contact information? In the mobile app, this shows up as a contact. In the web app, it’s just a blank gray box that says unsupported.

Other than that Mrs Lincoln…

Seriously though, other than that, the basic function of Voice is still outstanding. One phone number that rings in multiple places. I can take a call ringing on my cell phone on any desktop machine I’m logged into via voice. That’s amazingly useful. My phone number has been the same for 15 years now – when I get a new service plan or change phones, I can just route my Voice number to it, without having to port any numbers.

I really enjoy being able to use my USB Microphone and desktop speakers for cell phone calls without having to haul my phone out if someone is calling me. The audio quality is excellent and it’s very convenient. I would really hate to lose the product, but I also wish Google would fix some of the rough edges that are just getting rougher as the Voice ages.

If I didn’t have the nagging feeling Google will abandon Voice just like they do so many other products, I’d be a much bigger fan, but the slow eroding of functionality doesn’t give me a lot of hope.

Solved: Problems with WyzeCam Android Client

I’ve become a huge fan of the WyzeCam IP cameras. They’re small, very high quality, and have a very good mobile client to connect to them. But sometimes, the mobile client will refuse to start. It comes up with the startup screen, and never proceeds.

Searching around the Reddit and WyzeCam forums, many people have seen this happen, but there’s not a clear reason why.

I’ve had this happen on occasion on my Samsung S9+, and I’ve finally found a pattern – it’s quite simple actually.

On the loading screen, the client is making it’s initial connections to WyzeCam’s cloud services. But it’s quite common for providers, corporate networks, and sometimes even hotels or wifi hotspots to block connections to certain services. If the phone cannot connect to the cloud service, it will sit stuck at that startup screen forever, without ever doing anything.

I discovered this when my phone had connected to a mobile hotspot in the office which required authentication to start operating. The phone was connected, but could not reach the internet. The WyzeCam app was sticking at the opening screen. Once I completed the registration, and reloaded the Cam app, it came up super-fast.

I was able to duplicate this experience at a hotel stay recently as well. The local wifi was extremely crowded and performing extremely badly. The WyzeCam app was hanging at the startup screen again. As soon as I switched my phone from the WiFi to my carrier data, the screen loaded correctly!

I think Wyze could fix this very easily by giving some feedback on the loading screen, showing it’s trying to connect, and giving a timeout message if it fails after X amount of time. But for now, this frustrating behaviour is easy to understand and deal with.

Know what’s no fun? Smartphone failure while travelling.

Last week I was in California for a big tech summit my employer throws every 2 years. It’s a pretty big deal, with 3 days of presentations, workshops, tech demos, and interesting keynotes. I had a great time, met many of my coworkers I only know through voices on conference calls, and generally learned a ton.

Thursday night I was in the San Francisco offices, getting ready to head to the airport. I had 4 hours until my flight was scheduled to leave, and while in a meeting, I noticed my Moto X Pure (aka ‘Style’) phone reboots itself. “Okay, no worries, probably an update in progress. NBD.”

I went back to my meeting, and glanced at the phone again 10 minutes later. Looked like it was rebooting again. “Hmmm…. shouldn’t do that, but… okay…”

Half an hour later and continuous reboots, I was beginning to get worried. The pattern was the same. Boot, Optimizing apps, starting apps, reboot. Something was definitely wrong.

A little googling found me an article that describes the Moto X doing this sometimes when either an app gets corrupted, or there’s problems in the cache. Using instructions on the net I reset the cache from the bootloader, and let it try to boot again.

Nope, stuck in the loop again.

I was beginning to get very concerned. Traveling without a working phone, to echo a great movie… “Possible… but not recommended!”

In the end, I had to pull the ripcord, and do a full factory reset. Time until getting on the plane? 3 hours, with a half hour drive to the airport. This is the first time I’ve had to wipe and reload my phone from scratch as far as I can remember (we’re going back to Treo days here), at least where that sort of reload didn’t also involve replacing the phone completely.

In the end, it worked. The unit was able to do a factory reset, came up, did a few updates, and was back online with my normal account. It didn’t automatically reinstall all the apps (which I found a bit odd), so I had to manually tell Play to re-install the critical pieces I needed (including the authentication tool I use for work).

I was able to be on the road and mostly operational inside an hour, and made my flight just fine. I’ll credit my rabid use of 1Password for helping me get all my accounts re-connected.

Naturally, there’s still a few things that are out of whack. I spent a year twiddling that install to make the menus line up nicely, or set my backgrounds just so, etc, so post-reload, it sort of feels like a new phone, but really isn’t.

Now I’m on another trip, this time to Utah, and my phone is happily keeping me company. Alas, I’m finding all the little bits I haven’t reinstalled, such as all my local cached music in Spotify – something that would have been helpful on this flight But, that’s something to set up once I’m back in the hotel.

Vainglory

I’ve been on the lookout for a new game to put my new Moto X Pure Android through, a device that’s extremely high powered and seems perfect for games. Ever since I saw the tablet revolution taking over gaming, I’ve been hoping for a decent, realtime, immersive game that I could get behind. (Why WoW and Eve aren’t on tablets yet is beyond me).

My son Zach was a huge booster of MOBA games before they were cool. DOTA2, and later League of Legends were daily activities. I tried them off and on, but found the complexities and knowledge curve too much for casual gaming.

Enter Vainglory.

Many companies have claimed to make the MOBA experience enjoyable on a mobile device, but this is the first one that’s gotten me completely hooked. I’m still in casual play mode, but I’m finding it intensely enjoyable. The graphics are magnificent, the characters interesting and varied, and the gameplay is perfect. It’s a dead-on implementation of the MOBA ideals (and yes, it has last hits :).

I’ve put in a couple hours so far, getting a feel for 3 of the heroes. There’s so much more to learn – if you watch the videos on the Vainglory channel on Youtube, watch the detailed rundowns of how to play each hero. The technicalities are vast and deep, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever get to that point with more than 1-2 favorites, but I’m ecstatic that the company behind the game (awesomely named ‘SUPER EVIL MEGACORP‘), spared no expense in making the game easy to get into, but also having huge depth to it.

Anyone want to team?

Experimenting with Google Voice

I’ve been working up the gumption to gain some more flexibility in how I use my cell phone. Having had the same number with AT&T for over a decade, I was loathe to try out other carriers because each time I switched I’d need to port the number, increasing the risk of losing the number.

Google Voice has long tempted me as a possible solution. It allows me to have a single phone number, and have that number forwarded anywhere I like. The big win came when Voice allowed porting of existing phone numbers in.

Today I took the plunge.

I’ve ported my main cell phone number to Voice, gone to AT&T and gotten a new line and monthly plan on my old phone, and told Voice to forward calls to the new number. One big benefit to this is incoming calls will also ring me in Hangouts on my laptop. When a call comes in, I get a Hangouts popup saying Xxx is calling, and I can choose to pick it up on the laptop, using the speaker and mic there, or pick it up on my cell phone, which will also be ringing. I find using the laptop as a phone ‘terminal’ remarkably comfortable and clear, so this is a huge win.

Last but not least, now I am free to play around with phone configurations without risking being ‘cut off’ if my main cell phone number gets screwed up. Today I’m still on my old Galaxy S4, but I hope to get a Moto G or Moto X soon, and set that up as my carry-around device. All of this is going on, and from a callers perspective, nothing has changed. I have one phone number.. just how the call gets to me has been adjusted.

Today, I tried to read a book.

I tried. I really did try.

The book is “The Republic of Thieves” by Scott Lynch, third in the Gentlemen Bastards series. A neighbor had a copy here, and he loaned it to me.

I’ve been reading books on my phone for years now. This is the first time I only had a physical copy for quite some time… and a hardcover to boot.

“Heck, why not”, I thought. “It’s been a while, and people go on about how reading digital books just ain’t the same. Lets give it a whirl.”

Except… it wouldn’t fit in my backpack, so I couldn’t have it with me at work, where I usually sit and read during lunch. It stayed at home. When I had some spare time at skating, it wasn’t there. Didn’t have it with me when I went out for a burger tonight… so nope, not then. The only time I had access to it is at home, maybe just before I go to sleep, when I usually check my mail, do my last gaming, and spend some time with my sweetie.

But through all those times, I did have my phone with me.

I returned the book to my neighbor, and bought a digital version on Amazon.

Now I’ll get to read it.