Sprint announced yesterday at their 2009 Ope\n Developer Conference that they’ll be doing away with extra charges for subscribers using conditional call forwarding to connect their cell phones to third party voice providers such as Google Voice. Previously the carrier was one of the few who charged a per minute fee to their subscribers who programmed their phones to forward incoming calls that were unanswered.

The  new policy:

Although no charges will be applied for conditional call forwarding (meaning busy calls or calls not answered), some Sprint customers may incur a $0.20 per-minute charge if they choose to forward calls directly into voicemail or to another number without first allowing the call to try to reach the number and getting a busy signal/no answer. This is called unconditional call forwarding (immediate)

Sprint

Larry is on duty today but that doesn’t mean he isn’t keeping his eye on things. He just emailed me with great news… Google Voice now has its own mashup that allows you to use thew service without having to give everyone a new number. It is an awesome new mashup, and I for one am thrilled.

Let me explain…

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The Google Voice service had been operating as a closed invitation only service. Users who joined were provided with a free phone number from which they could direct all incoming calls to any of their regular numbers. That phone number also provided voice mail where the messages were transcribed and also received (and reply to) SMS text messages. Starting today Google is giving existing Voice users three invitations so that they can invite their friends to try the service. When you log into your account the invitations will be listed in the lower left.

Google Voice

Leave it to Michael Arrington to hit the nail on the head. In a post over on TechCrunch, Arrington points out how the recent approval of an iPhone app for Vonage merely serves to highlight the total nonsense Apple spewed when trying to explain their Google Voice rejection.

The gist… Apple said the Google Voice app was rejected because it

appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls…

All good and well until you take a closer look and see that many apps do just that. Numerous camera apps all but replace the “core” camera functionality. And phone apps like Skype, Truphone and the recent Vonage app have.. gasp… dialers of their own.

That’s when Arrington nails it. He writes… Continue Reading

Hold on to your hats because this one is going to blow your mind… with regard to the whole Google Voice debacle it turns out… wait for it… okay, ready?… it turns out APPLE LIED!!!

Shocked? Amazed? Dumbfounded? Yeah, neither are we.

But the hubris Apple has to bold face lie to the FCC is pretty amazing.

Not sure what we’re talking about? Let’s go back a bit…

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Google Voice, if you have been missing out, is the Internet based phone forwarding service by Google. It gives you a separate phone number, which you can give out as if it is your regular phone number. You can then change your settings to have calls forwarded to any of your phones. Best of all, it is free except for international calls.

Now, OneTouch Solutions has developed OneDialer, a solution for Windows Mobile users to use this wonderful feature on their phone. It is a fully featured Google Voice dialer, SMS and Visual Voicemail client.

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Google Voice is already a useful system, but Google is now expanding their Google Voice offering by now offering the ability to listen to your Google Voice voicemail directly in Gmail.

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Google Voice activated a new feature yesterday. It allows you to check a box in your Google Voice settings and have all of your SMS Text messages received by the service forwarded to your email. This means dedicated Google Voice users can stop receiving (or sending) any text messages on the phone and instead route everything through email. Can you say “Bye Bye Pricey Unlimited Text Messaging Plans”? Once a text message is forwarded to your email it can be replied to via email as well (Google creates a special email address for each person’s phone that you text). Use a service like Pushmail and you’ll get instant pop-up alerts that are as fast as text messaging.

Google Voice Blog

Newsy has a report posted offering different perspectives on Google Voice v. Apple.

I understand that it is not cut and dry, and that it is a complex issue; but it is one that I suspect Apple will ultimately lose.

My biggest issue these days is Apple approving an app and then either removing or changing it AFTER people have bought it. If they are going to do that, then they should have a system to AUTOMATICALLY reimburse people who bought it in good faith.

Who is in the right? Who is in the wrong? Who will win in the end? What do you think?

photo credit: JaeYong, BAE

AT&T’s did their very best to make it totally, unambiguously clear that they played no part in GoogleVoice-gate. Yes two apps were rejected after they were approved but it was all Apple. So what can Apple do after being thrown under the bus by their “partner”? Why throw the truth under the bus as well, of course.

Seriously, they have some pretty smart lawyers but even I read some of this and thought “you’re kidding right?” Then I read it a second time and the “REAL MEANING” began to emerge. As a service to our readers We have run Apple’s response to the FCC through our Gear Diary Translator. What emerges is a letter that has a far truer ring to it than the one originally submitted.

Let’s take a look at the letter without the “Apple-speak”.

What was written… “We are pleased to respond to the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau’s inquiry dated July 31, 2009″

What was meant… “WTF? Don’t you know we’re Apple??? Questioning us? Challenging our decisions? Seriously? We’re Apple!”

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If AT&T’s initial response to the FCC over the removal of two Google Voice apps and the outright rejection of Google’s own app from the App Store wasn’t clear enough the first time around they are out to make it perfectly clear…

We Did Not Do It!!!

Actually their own words went something like this…

…let me state unequivocally, AT&T had no role in any decision by Apple to not accept the Google Voice application for inclusion in the Apple App Store. AT&T was not asked about the matter by Apple at any time, nor did we offer any view one way or the other.

So maybe AT&T wasn’t behind the GV debacle. Still, by their own admission they HAVE been involved in the crippling of some potentially awesome apps so… AT&T, you might be in the clear on this one but we still don’t like you any more than we did before.

You can find the full document over on Tech Crunch.

I am slowly making my way to using Google Voice full time. It remains a bit of a hassle to make calls from my iPhone but the upside of using GV far out weighs the downside.

The biggest use I have for it is being able to initiate calls from my iMac or MacBook Pro and then, as soon as I finish the call, I can make notes or set a followup task for myself. I hated having to go to the GV website each time, however, so I went in search of a desktop widget that would serve the same function. I found it, and it is fantastic. Continue Reading

I’ll keep this brief… If you missed this NYTimes piece on the first round in the Google-Apple boxing match when it was published a few days ago, I recommend it as a “MUST-READ”. In it David Pogue does a great job of putting the whole Google Voice debacle in context.

You can find the article HERE.

Google’s now inviting all military personnel (must have a .mil email address, be in the US and have a US phone number) to apply for a Google Voice account. They’re promising approval within a day or two. The popular Google Voice service is free and provides a replacement phone number for subscribers to distribute to their contacts. Currently in a closed beta the service has been slowly trickling out invitations over the last several weeks and presently has a waiting period of several weeks for non-military users.

Google Voice via RWW

So, you have a Google Voice account and an iPhone, but don’t have any of the native applications (GV Mobile, VoiceCentral) because Apple pulled them from the App Store before you downloaded them? While there are other options out there, such as running GV Mobile on a jailbroken iPhone, there is another option that may work if you have a few contacts that you want to frequently call via Google Voice.

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