I ended up installing Google Voice on my BlackBerry.  Why?  Cause my employer took away SMS/MMS messaging from the calling plan.  There goes my social life.  Anyway, I was expecting the standard Google fare: highly refined user experience, the necessary minimum of features to get going, combined with the fast access time.  Well…one of out three ain’t bad.  It’s speedy.  Oh, hold on, one out of three actually sucks.  At least it’s fast.

Here are the sins of the application – hope they fix them soon:

• There is no light indicator to see that an SMS arrived
• There is no sound or vibrate to indicate a new text message and no way to configure it
• Auto text does not work when composing SMS.  In other words, the first letter of the sentence will not automatically go upper case, even though every other Google app on the BlackBerry happily does it.
• There is no push capability – the application must poll Google servers to check for new activity
• MMS is non-existent
• When the SMS message does arrive, the Google Voice icon changes very imperceptibly.  It needs much better contrast, similar to the Gmail app.
• When you are looking at your SMS conversations – Google Voice displays just the phone number, not the name.  This is massively odd, considering that I started the conversation from the Address Book.