By George Norman - Software News Editor
Added on 10 Aug 2009(330 Views)
Goggle Voice, the service that uses VoIP to link your phone numbers and put them under the umbrella of a single Google Voice number, will be retooled and released as a web app. Google seems to be taking the same route it did with the Google Latitude for iPhone app – the company came up with a native Google Latitude app for the iPhone, but when Apple rejected it, the company released a Google Latitude web app instead.

According to New York Times’ David Pogue, the Google Voice web app will “offer exactly the same features as the rejected app--except that it will take the form of a specialized, iPhone-shaped Web page. For all intents and purposes, it will behave exactly the same as the app would have.”


If we were to take the Google Latitude app for reference, then we will notice that compared to a native iPhone app, it comes with a few drawbacks: it works only as long as you keep it running in the device’s browser, it cannot provide continuous background location updates, instead of getting push notifications related to your friends’ movements, you have to leave the browser and the web app running in the foreground.

Now I genuinely hope that the Google Voice app will indeed come with no functionality drawbacks and will function just as well as a web app as it would have as a native app. This would really be great for the iPhone user – not for Apple, because the company not only rejected the native Google Voice app, but went ahead and pulled all Google Voice-related apps from the App Store. The reason cited by Apple was that it duplicates “features that come with the iPhone”. That reason was not powerful enough for, say, the Federal Communications Commission – the FCC launched an investigation into why apple rejected the app.

In related Google Voice news, the Mountain View-based search engine giant has announced that the launch of a new program: if you have a .mil email address you can sign up with Google Voice and start using it within a day.





Don't forget to:

RSS


Tags: Google, Google Voice, Web App, Apple, iPhone

Link to this article:



Add comment:
Name(Required)
Email(Required - Never shown)
Website(Optional)
Comment(Required):

Insert the following code:
Software News
Chromium OS Goes Open-Source
This summer Google let the world know that it is working on a new operating system meant for the user that spends most of his time online. The operating system – aptly named Chrome OS because it is a natural extension...
20 Nov 2009
Office 2010 Beta Downloads Available to the Public
Earlier this week Redmond-based software giant Microsoft announced that Office 2010 became available for download as a Beta. The catch was that only ...
20 Nov 2009
Mozilla Releases: Firefox 3.6 Beta 3
The development process of the Firefox 3.6 browser is moving along rapidly. The first Beta version was released at the start of the month; Beta 2 was released about two weeks after Beta 1. About a week has passed since...
20 Nov 2009
New Labs Feature for Gmail: Green Robot!
The software developers at Google have announced the release of a new Gmail Labs offering called Green Robot! This new offering is meant to improve the Gmail Chat user experience by letting the ...
20 Nov 2009
Opera Mobile 10 Beta for Windows Mobile Is Out Also
Opera Software, the company that we all know for making the innovative and feature rich Opera web browser, has released Opera Mobile 10 Beta for Windows Mobile-powered devices. This release follows in the...
19 Nov 2009
Beta Testing is Over, Stable Version of Trillian for iPhone Released
The focus so far has been on desktop version of this multiprotocol instant messaging software application, Trillian Astra (version 4.1). Today is time to switch focus away from the desktop version and onto something a bit more...
19 Nov 2009
Recommended Tools

Top Downloads