Google unveiled their newest app to the world of Android a few days ago with Hangouts. This app is supposed to take over all of their multitude of messaging apps that they currently have and replace them with this unified and well balanced messaging and communication hub. There was a major problem right off the bat though. Google Voice was not immediately functional from the new Hangouts app, so people who had switched over to Hangouts, but needed to still use Google Voice were left scrambling to reset back to the old app to still use that service.
No introduction of a new product goes over without any speed bumps, especially one from such a wide audience as Google customers, but the Google Voice slip up was a pretty large one and warranted a mention from Google’s higher ups that inbound and outbound calls will be supported with Google Voice in the Hangouts app very soon. How soon is very soon? They didn’t set a date in stone, but for those who heavily rely on Google Voice the service is still up and running, just independent of the Hangouts app.
As of now, Hangouts is basically the same thing as Google Talk which many of us Gmail and Google+ users have on their phones already. It has nothing amazing about it that Talk didn’t necessarily cover, and the real issue of total integration will only be resolved once Google figures out the Voice inclusion with the Hangouts app. Until then, I’ll stick with trusty old Google Talk and when the Hangouts is completely ready to hit the ground running I’ll give it another go.