UK iPhone

You may remember the hype that surrounded the launch by Google of the G-Phone, a supposed iPhone killer that pretty much failed to impress and had little impact. But Google has obviously not given up on their phone ambitions, and like Microsoft, they tend to improve incrementally on their initially poor offerings over time.

So say hello to Google Voice, an ambitious offering from Google that seems to integrate all of your phones into a single service that is controlled via the Web. You get one number from Google that you can forward to all of your other phones, use voicemail, listen in on voicemail as it’s being recorded (a clever touch) and the voicemail is transcribed and placed into an email-like mailbox accessible via the Web.

Other cool stuff is call screening (unknown or blocked-ID callers are asked for their name, which is then played back to you so you can decide whether to take the call) and aggressive number blocking (a caller receives the three-rising-tone “number not in service” message).

By putting a lot of the phone functionality on the Web, and abstracting your number from a particular device, Google Voice is a threat to all of the current players in the mobile phone industry, not just Apple. But if it works well, the iPhone should be able to find a niche as one of your phones, and of course the apps tend to keep people using an iPhone even if it’s not the greatest phone in the world!

UPDATE: David Pogue of the New York Times on Google Voice.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.