Google Voice is cool, but it's more work

At its heart, Google Voice is a call forwarding service, providing a single number that can ring all, or any, of your phones. But the Mountain View Internet company's vision is much more ambitious: to supplant the mishmash of passwords, formats and contact lists across office, home and mobile phones with a simple, one-stop platform, easily accessible anytime and anywhere. "Google Voice is about helping you organize all your communications, whether it's calls or SMS, and have them all in one place in the cloud, tied to you, not to a device or location," said Vincent Paquet, senior product manager for Google Voice. It almost does it, too. For now, however, Google Voice's inventive and helpful features are layered atop existing devices, software and contracts, not seamlessly integrated. That leaves them subject to complications that prevent the service from fully realizing its promise.