Mountain View-based search engine giant Google has recently released the Google Voice app for iPhone users to enjoy. Just like Google Latitude, it is a web app not a native app, which means it comes with some drawbacks as well as some advantages. The main drawback is that you’ll need to keep the browser up and running for the app to work; the upside is that since you run the app in the browser, you do not have to download and install it.

No matter what your opinion is, the Google Voice web app is out there, letting iPhone users access a streamlined version of their Google Voice inbox. The app also lets them display their Google Voice number as the outbound caller ID, send and receive text messages for free, and place international calls at Google Voice's low rates.

The Google Voice web app provides the same features to Palm WebOS, Nokia S60, Windows Mobile, and other mobile devices. Android and Blackberry users get this functionality as well, just that they can install the application directly on their device, they don’t need to run it in the browser.

Soon the Google Voice mobile app will be able to do one other thing: send SMS to multiple recipients. Tech Staff Team member with Google, Greg Hecht, explains:

“Until now, sending a text message to multiple recipients required copying and pasting the message for each recipient. To make this a bit easier, we just launched the ability to send a single SMS message to multiple recipients. Just click on the SMS button at the top of your Google Voice inbox, enter names or numbers (separated by commas) in the "To" field, write your message and click send. Replies from each recipient will be threaded into separate conversations, so you can keep track of them in your Google Voice inbox. To prevent spam, we've set a maximum of five recipients per message.”