Comment Re:Wrong tool for the wrong job. (Score 4, Interesting) 169
It depends. I live in Portland, Oregon and tried this with Clear, Skype, and call-forwarding.
For me personally (and I assume at least multiple other people reading this website), I primarily use my cell phone at home and at work. It works reasonably well in this situation assuming you have good coverage at both ends. The battery life is a non-issue because it is primarily plugged in. I don't answer my phone when driving anyway, so most of my friends will leave a voicemail.
The biggest issue is network latency. It is like having a conversation over (forgive me) NAT-blocked Xbox Live. There is a very noticeable lag in the conversation.
When going out, I used my cell phone for texts. You can have Skype transcribe your voicemails and SMS you with their contents. Then you can respond via email/SMS.
All in all it worked decently, although it was fairly involved to set up. I stopped using it in the end because of the lag, the fact that Clear wouldn't support the Nokia n810, and finally I got tired of lugging the netbook around. It was an interesting experiment and you could probably make do with it, but it is not very practical just yet.