Google Voice gets real

Google Voice is finally broadly available, and Google is taking it forward with new dialer apps that make it much easier to use.  Two highlights:
  1. Broadly available. According to Twitter traffic, personal experience and published reports, Google has finally sent invites to just about all the people who requested a number. Next step, according to David Pogue at the New York Times: Google Voice users each get a few invites to send to friends.
  2. Two new dialers. Google has unleashed dialers for BlackBerry and Android that show the Google Voice number as the number the call is coming from (!). The BlackBerry dialer is a separate app, so you have to call from within it. You can’t call out on Google Voice from your address book, for instance. But the Android dialer, if you so choose, takes over your phone; contacts, native text messaging and everything else shows as from and to your Google Voice number. (The phone’s native number still works.)
Of course, there’s another shoe still to drop. Everyone is waiting, of course, for the iPhone dialer. Will it be as extensive as the Android one? Will AT&T allow it to be? The iPhone version is said to be “in the works”, leaving everyone who follows Google Voice on tenterhooks. 
 
Why is this so important? iPhone has 35 million users, whereas Android is still around a million. BlackBerry has about 30 million users, but many BlackBerry users are corporate employees whose phones are tied into corporate e-mail and phone services; as such, they will be non-users or part-time GV users for a long time to come. For now, iPhone is the prize. Google Voice is already very popular on iPhone, and if it’s going to be wildly successful in these early days, it needs an excellent iPhone user experience.
 
This will no doubt come eventually; AT&T won’t have an iPhone exclusive forever. Apple itself may have conflicting interests here, though. iPhone users tend to view the carrier as just a barely competent pipe provider for their love affair with their iPhones; Google Voice users tend to view the carrier as just a barely competent pipe provider for their relationship with Google Voice. Does anyone else see a potential conflict looming?
 
The puzzle pieces that are falling into place so far, though, are all positive. An Android-type dialer for the iPhone and inboud number portability – letting you move yur current cell phone number to Google Voice – are the big remaining question marks.
 
News and resources for Google Voice:
  1. David Pogue has a comprehensive update in today’s New York Times. He makes a good point about losing free in-network call minutes if your calls go through Google Voice.
  2. If the new Google Voice dialer makes you want to take another look at Android, here’s a good Android/iPhone comparison and list of hot early Android apps, a couple of which are telephony-related. (Most of the others have to do with GPS.)
  3. The best starting point for all of Google Voice’s features remains Google’s features page.
 
 

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 1:54 pm and is filed under News, Reviews and comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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