Question about Google Voice/Visual Voicemail

[Ruh]

I do not use the native visual voicemail at all right now. In fact, I believe that if you switch to GV you lose all of your currently saved voice messages (I can't remember if that is correct or not).

Really the way I have it set up now, the only time I have to open GV is when I go to play a message. I don't get notified by the app itself of a new message (on a side note: I would think this would help with performance and battery life not having the program running in the background and also using background data). I do get notified when I have a new voicemail though because I get it converted to a text message and sent to me.