Google Voice comes to iPhone--again

Jake Widman
Wednesday, 27 January 2010 01:07

Your IT - Mobility

Six months after Apple rejected iPhone apps that enabled the smartphone to access Google Voice, Google has released a browser-based mobile app to get around the rejection.

The free Google Voice let subscribers have a single phone number that will ring through to any other phone(s) they designate. But it also provides voice mail that can be retrieved online, as well as the ability to make long distance and international calls via a local number, both features that tread on iPhone partner AT&T's toes.

Last July, Apple rejected Google's own proposed Google Voice app for the iPhone, as well as dropping two other apps that had been in the App Store for months.

That action triggered an inquiry from the FCC to see if there was any untoward monopolistic behavior involved. The three companies answered the FCC's questions, and that was pretty much the end of it.

Now Google has come back with another Google Voice mobile app, this time one that works on Palm WebOS smartphones as well as the iPhone.

That's because it's a rich Web application that runs in the phones's browser, using features of HTML5.

According to the Google Voice Blog, "in addition to letting you access a streamlined version of your Google Voice inbox, the new Web app also lets you display your Google Voice number as the outbound caller ID (so return calls come back to your Google Voice number), send and receive text messages for free, and place international calls at Google Voice's low rates."

The app (not App) is available through a mobile browser at m.google.com/voice.