SteveNYC says: Just wanted to point out that the Talkatone premium service is $20/year, not $20/month. Good article though. I wasn’t familiar with Vtok.
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ddubbua says:
Thanks! Wouldn’t really be worth it for $20/mo would it? Must have had a brain fart. Thanks for the correction.
Kieran Mullen says: How could you say the audio quality of Talkatone is better if you did not sign up for the premium service and they only offer the routing of data though their servers WITH the premium service?
ddubbua says: I don’t. I just said it’s better than vtok and can still get even better when you buy the premium service. This was at the time or writing this article. Haven’t revisited vtok to see if they’ve stepped up their game.
Jason says: Hi When you mention using a bluetooth headset, could you also answer a call using the bluetooth headset?
Integration
With the Vtok iPhone app you need both the Google voice app and the Vtok app. As you’d expect the two apps don’t always play nice with each other. The reasoning for needing the two apps is that you’re essentially using two services- Google voice & Google Talk. Thankfully, Talkatone integrates with both services so that you only need the one app. The result is a lot more stability & reliability from Talkatone for phone calls. Talkatone text messaging is a whole other story.
Features
Call Quality
The call quality with Talkatone is much better than Vtok, the reasoning is that Talkatone compresses the audio and processes it using their own servers rather than just taking the audio directly from Google. They even offer an option to increase the call quality even more with their $20/year premium plans.