So you are thinking of going and getting that very tempting Virgin Mobile $35/month plan but are scared that the 300 minutes may not be enough? There are other ways to save on minutes. For those of us with smartphones why not leverage the capabilities of the phone itself?
If you really want to "drink the koolaid" and don't mind being a little geeky you can use one of many voip (Voice over IP) programs out there for various smartphones.There are programs out there that allow you to talk free between users of that program. Most are cross platform compatible between iphone and android users. Some you may heard of like Skype and some you may not have heard of like Viber. The only issue I have with these is they are only free if the other person has the same application and account. This can severely limit your reach to the free calls. While Skype does offer a low cost to make calls to regular phones it isn't free like we like now is it?
If you have a Google Voice account you are in luck! There is an app for iPhone and Android that allows you to use your data connection and send/receive phone calls over data while not using any minutes. This is not like the "Google Voice" app that is available for nearly all smartphones. That program written and distributed by Google themselves is merely just a simple dialer that only dials out to google when you make a call so it appears that the call is coming from your google voice number. We don't want this. We want true voice over IP like calls. The way these programs work is using the same system that Google has setup for you to make/receive free calls while logged into your gmail account.
Enough of the "how it works" mumbo jumbo... show me how to save my minutes you say? Well here goes. The program for iPhone is called Talkatone and is free in the app store. The android one is called Groove IP and is available in the Market for $3.99. Essentially both do the same thing. You simply sign in to the application with your Google Voice username and password. Then you are presented with a dialer that you can make outgoing calls through. This is a great feature for those that can handle a little lag during conversations and want to save minutes. With both you will need a google voice account and will need to set the phones to ring in your account settings to be at least "Google Talk". Each application has good documentation on how to properly set it up.
One caveat I will suggest though. If you plan to make this one of your primary ways of making/receiving calls get a dedicated google voice account. You can do this by clicking here. When creating this account be sure to have random letters and numbers in the account login. The more obscure the better. This is only because if people send you a google talk message it can mess up your voice settings. This is an account you will ONLY use for google voice. Not email, not chat, just google voice. Once you test it out enough and want to port your real number over google has an option to do that also.
In the end, I chose to port my number to google voice so I will have the same phone number indefinitely. We were going to port the Mrs number over but for various reasons did not. We both are on the cheap 300 minutes a month plan and use at a minimum of the google voice app to send/receive SMS messages and view our visual voice mail that google gives you with your account. When we are at the in-laws we have next to no cell reception but that does not stop us from making/receiving calls. All it takes is to jump on the wifi and open up GrooveIP. No one is the wiser!
So there you go, a number of ways to save on your cell minutes. With this you may be able to cut your minute package to a bare minimum and save some serious money. Let us know what you think.
Next time: Who wants free home phone service? :)
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