Here’s why you can’t get Google Voice on your Sprint phone

Short story: Google Voice DOES work on Sprint phones including Hawaii, but will NOT work if your Sprint phone is under a corporate account (like mine). Here’s the details:

I was really excited to enable Google Voice on my Sprint EVO 4G phone “Hawaii Sprint Customers: Do we get Google Voice?“. So you could imagine how bummed I was when Google Voice says, “Unfortunately, Google Voice cannot be enabled on this Sprint phone. Please contact Sprint for more details as to why this cannot be enabled.”

Worse yet, other Hawaii Sprint customers were telling me that it worked just fine for them. Damn! Why me, Lord?

Well today I finally called Sprint. They were a little puzzled too but after digging around, we found out why: My Sprint is under my corporate account and apparently business accounts are not allowed to enable Google voice. While I’m disappointed, I can see why. On a policy level, if this was my company’s phone, I can certainly see that my boss might not approve of me implementing various re-routing and voicemail rules that Google Voice allows.

So, if you’ve got a personal/home Sprint account, you should be good. If you’ve got corporate, you’re out of luck.

Final note: a shout-out goes to the Sprint folks. I’ve only been with them for a year but their customer support has always been excellent, the service has been fabulous (I can’t recall a single dropped call that my phone caused) and the phone (other than the absolutely crappy battery life) has been an incredible workhorse. Thanks Sprint!