Need help with 2 Droid phones sharing a Google Voice #

[jfields808]

I have a Google voice # that I have successfully shared between a Blackberry and Droid. Call the number and both phones ring and each phone can call the other using the Verizon cell number assigned. Worked great. Changed from a Blackberry to a Droid pro and now the other Droid can not call the Pro using the "real" cell phone number. It automatically goes to a recording asking for a pin. However, the Pro can call the other Droid. Mystifying and frustrating. None of the settings were changed. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[born2golf]

tricky problem...

How is voice mail being handled for each phone? Are they both using google voice as the default mailbox? have you done *71,###-###-### on both phones? If so I'm not sure if that is a supported configuration. You may not have run into this problem before because I don't think that voice mail replacement is an option on the blackberry.

If that is not an officially supported operating mode, you may need to turn off google voice mailbox on one of the phones. That is done by dialing *73. I would try that on the "other droid" and see what happens. My guess is that it would solve the problem, but not ultimately be what you are trying to achieve.

Also, Are you using google voice to place the outgoing call? If so, try turning that off and see what happens. The setting is in the google voice app. If this solves the problem, I would recommend 2 permanent solution options:

1. There is an app called voice choice. This allows you to use GV to handle all calls, but you can designate certain numbers that will NOT use google voice to make calls.
2. use the google voice toggle widget which simplifies switching how google voice handles outgoing calls. You'd have to do this each time you wanted to call between phones.

 

[jfields808]

Okay, Born2Golf, you gave me a good lead. I've played around with this a bit more and it seems I must have set my Pro to have Google Voicemail accept all calls instead of just those who dial the Google number (which is how the Blackberry worked). We haven't touched the older Droid so I know it's not the problem. Can I set my Pro to have Google Voicemail only accept unanswered calls from people who dial my Google Voice #? Thanks for the help.

 

[born2golf]

Okay, Born2Golf, you gave me a good lead. I've played around with this a bit more and it seems I must have set my Pro to have Google Voicemail accept all calls instead of just those who dial the Google number (which is how the Blackberry worked). We haven't touched the older Droid so I know it's not the problem. Can I set my Pro to have Google Voicemail only accept unanswered calls from people who dial my Google Voice #? Thanks for the help.

google voice does not provide a setting for this. However, I believe that a call placed to your google voice number will automatically go to your google voice mailbox after a set period of time with no answer. I think time is around 30-40 seconds (you can look this up somewhere). So in theory, if you set the mobile to ring for a time period longer than the GV pickup window before going to voice mail, any call forwarded to that number would land in the GV mailbox if unanswered. And any call placed to that number directly would land in the mobiles normal mailbox.

I'll admit that this is a cludgy scenario, but to my knowledge it's all we have to work with. I've pondered about why google voice doesn't just create a setting for the number of rings before going to voice mail. I have come to believe that since they are only forwarding the call, and not receiving the call, they may have no way of knowing how many time it has rung, since different phone systems work differently and they are an impartial player in the middle. Hence they have settled for a fixed time frame. If that is indeed the case I would personally prefer they allow the user to select the time frame.

I suppose the question would be why would you do this? Why manage 2 mailboxes? Alternatively, you could set up different greetings in your google voice mailbox which would be used to handle inbound calls from different source numbers. That way you still only have one mailbox to manage, and the inbound callers still get a different experience.