kugelfish

I now have a cellphone plan, where all outgoing calls are metered and very expensive, except for unlimited calls to 3 favorite numbers, which are included in the plan. For our international calling, we are already using a discount carrier activated through a dial prefix, which also supports a local land-line dial-in access to be usable from mobile phones. By declaring the access number as one of my favorites, I can make unlimited calls from my mobile phone at the substantially lower rate of the discount carrier. The only problems is that making calls through the indirection of a voice-prompt menu is very cumbersome! This is where Phonecard Express comes in. This highly customizeable application inserts itself almost transparently as a filter between the Android system dialer and the telephony subsystem. Whether a call is made from the dialer, the address book or any other intent, the call setup is intercepted and potentially routed through a calling card service. In addition to suppo...

I started using the new Google Voice service as my standard US phone number. Since they currently only support international calling (billed rate), but not international forwarding, the current setup is a bit suboptimal and roundabout: from Google Voice, calls are forwarded to my US based Skype online number, with my skype account itself being forwarded to my current cellphone. The only catch is that the post-dial-delay of this whole contraption is too long for me to pick up the call before it goes to voicemail and since the voicemail delay is not configurable there isn't much I can do. I once managed to catch a call today, by leaping at the answer button on the first ring - it was a wrong number... At least I get an email notification right away, when somebody leaves a message. I could probably just as well turn off forwarding and just use it as a email based voicemail-box.