Joe Levi:
a cross-discipline, multi-dimensional problem solver who thinks outside the box – but within reality™

Google Voice, now available on iPhone, sort of

Google Voice is amazing. But I’m not going to tell you why, or try and convince you fence-sitters in this post.

This post is about iPhone and Pre users being left out in the cold and not able to really use Google Voice because there wasn’t an app available for them. Well, that’s not entirely true. There is an iPhone app, but Apple rejected it because Google Voice “duplicated functionality built into the phone” or some nonsense like that.

To combat that, Google has been working feverishly to get a web app completed which duplicates much of the functionality of the app itself. The web app can be located at m.google.com/voice

At the core of Google Voice is its unified voicemail inbox where your SMS and voicemails (and recorded phone calls) all go.  This web app takes care of that. But to really make it useful, you need to be able to make phone calls and send SMS texts through your Google Voice account. This web app allows you to do that as well.

Obviously this isn’t as elegant a solution as we’d all like for iPhone and Pre, but it’s a good example of what can be done via a web app, and how to tell AT&T (et. al.) that users aren’t going to stand for locked down app stores.

Freedom of choice means freedom to walk away from your product and eventually your brand.

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