[NEWS] If Palm is Working on a Google Voice App, It Can Measure Up

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If Palm is Working on a Google Voice App, It Can Measure Up




With all of the brouhaha surrounding Apple, Google, the FCC, and Google Voice (check out TiPb's excellent roundup here), it's only natural that a nation would turn its lonely eyes to other platforms and ask "Whither Google Voice." Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington did just that, suggesting that "A source close to Palm" says the "company plans to roll our deep integration with Google Voice on the Pre [...] sometime in the next month."
Arrington casts aspersions on the whole ordeal because from Google's side, he doesn't see evidence of the company working closely with Palm on the integration. He also says that because Google doesn't yet offer a real API for Google Voice, Palm is going to have a very difficult time making an app feel as deeply integrated as it ought.
We can't speak to whether or not Palm is working on a Google Voice app (we hope they are), but if we're going to hold some speculative, unreleased Palm-created Google Voice App to a standard, let's at least make that standard realistic.
(Oh yeah, there's plenty more, read on)
First, Arrington helpfully points to one of the three Google Voice apps in our Homebrew App gallery, but in the interest of full disclosure, there are three Homebrew Google Voice apps right now:

• dkGoogleVoice
  
• P2GoogleVoice
• gDial Pro

With these apps, you can dial Google Voice, send SMS messages, view your Google Voice call logs, SMS history, and Voicemails, list and search contacts, and access the mobile Google Voice site in-app. They're quite full featured.
Arrington's main gripe is that these apps can't integrate deeply with the phone:

There are already third party Google Voice apps for the Pre, such as this one, but again, those apps cant integrate deeply with the phone. Thats because Google Voice has no API right now, so Google has to build deep integration apps directly

...and later in the comments, he elaborates the following point several times:

[...] without the API it doesnt work perfectly. For example, if you call out to someone, it calls you, then calls them and connects you. And it cant take over the call log and dialer properly.

With regard to how dialing out works, it's not perfect, but it's actually pretty decent. The Homebrew Apps have a "web based dial" option that uses what amounts to an API to send the command to Google to ring you up to initiate the call. Would it really be that difficult for Palm to use that method and then just auto-answer the incoming Google Voice call to get you connected? No, no it would not.
Yes, a full and official API from Google would be welcome - I certainly want one, but it's not necessary for a relatively elegant Google Voice app. The betas I have listed above are already elegant apps, limited mainly by the fact that the Mojo SDK doesn't give the full access to the deeper guts of the system (access Palm certainly does have). I suppose it's possible that the methods these apps use to access Google Voice could break someday, but given the rate at which they've been developed (believe me, I've been watching), I am confident that such changes would be tiny bumps in the road.
Arrington's complaint really consists of two parts - that Google doesn't have an API and that the Mojo SDK doesn't allow deep level access for apps to futz with the call log and dialer. We've addressed the API part, what about the Mojo SDK part?
Why is Arrington holding the Pre to a higher standard than, well, than the iPhone? Does anybody really think that were the Google Voice App for the iPhone accepted, it would be allowed to "integrate deeply" and "take over the call log and dialer properly" on the iPhone? Seriously? It probably can't be as integrated as it is on Android, granted, but if Google decides to chip in, it certainly could be.
If the standard the Pre has to compare to is Google's own smartphone OS (Android) talking to Google's own service, would we expect any other implementation to be as elegant? Even without Google's direct help, it's possible for Palm to build a Google Voice app that's at least as elegant and powerful as anything that Apple would have possibly allowed on the iPhone.
Actually, with the Homebrew Apps above, we're already there.


original blog can be found here:

http://www.precentral.net/if-palm-working-google-voice-app-it-can-measure