Just in case anyone didn't get the memo, Google Voice is now open to the public. Yes, you heard that right. Anyone can now sign up and use it without an invitation: http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/

Edit: Anyone with a US IP address can sign up. Sorry- posted this late at night and momentarily forgot there's a world outside the Continental US. Apologies to Europeans, Canadians and other citizens of the world if I got your hopes up.

Anyone in the USA/Canada, that is ...

Technically, it's anyone who can get it registered via USA/Canada. You might need an US IP number and phone number during the registration process. Which is possible from abroad, for free.

granted anyone who is temporarily in the states, has friends/relatives there, or who can use a proxy to get an appropriate IP can now sign up and obtain a GV number.

However, the different charging for mobile phone usage (voice & SMS) and fixed line local/national dialed calls between N. America & Europe means that the count is of little practical use to the average user outwith North America (we pay to make local calls and to make calls to mobiles; these calls are free to receive).

Surely the point of GV is for you to be easily contactable by people who want to call you (at a charge to those callers which is similar to, or less than, they'd otherwise pay) and for the user experience for yourself to be convenent/feature rich/integrated.

Unless you fall into a fairly small subset of non-US-resident individuals who:

a) receive lots of calls originating within N. America, and
b) are willing to jump through hoops to set up SIP (or conventional) call forwarding solutions outwith GV in order to route calls originating in N. America to an international destination

then I can see no practical benefit to obtaining a GV acount from outwith N. America at present - GV neither offers international numbers, nor allows forwarding of a V number to an international termination point AFAIK.

@Volt - either I am missing something, or you are trying to out-pedant me :-)

*technically* I suspect you'd be in breach of your licence agreement wth Google if you were to obtain an account by this subterfuge (though I haven't read the agreement they presumably make you accept during sign-up, so I may be wrong on that).

*practically* you can of course do so fairly easily, as you point out - but the point of doing so somewhat eludes me? Google's automated vVoicemail transcription is the only thing I can think of that you'd gain as compared to using Skype, SIP et al. - but that is hardly a killer app for someone in Europe, unless they have some special circumstances (like trying to front a business in the US without people realising they don't actually reside there, or whatever).

Horrible news. Hard to get rid of this facehugger...

...or c) are damned curious on hyped web services and maybe got an invite you wanted to check out before you realized the service doesn't want a world wide audience yet. Unless you have a preference for jumping hoops, I don't think you'd be a Maemo user at all.

I am sure they will eventually, and till then at least it will work as SIP. There was a worry about not being able to use GV without being in the US/CA, I just pointed out while that's practically true, it's still possible to test the service if one so desire.

Possibly. I do not remember, maybe there's something mentioned in the GV threads here. This is after all where I learned everything I know about GV

I would say it's the same as the point of downloading a 30 dial trial of Photoshop before there's a localized version available for sale. Testing it.

fair points, well made. You've (almost) convinced me to give GV a try "because it's there" - but I have a few other hoops I fancy jumping through first :-)

cmon google, it's internet, make it available for all of us..

BTW it's only available for the US, not in Canada

So how are we going to use this on the N900? It's on an old thread isn't it?