Google Voice Comes to iPhone Via Web – Screenshots

Probably tired of waiting around for Apple to decide whether it will ever approve a Google Voice app for the iPhone, Google decided to do a bit of an end-around on the app store by releasing a very nice html5 web app which will work on the iPhone and the Palm Pre/Pixi.

Looks like a dialer

The app is now live and is available at http://m.google.com/voice. Google previously had a web-based interface for google voice which worked, but was not quite as intuitive. This html5 version brings almost all of the functionality of a native app on the iPhone.

And there’s nothing Apple can really do about it.

The buttons in the web app all respond as one would expect in a native app. Dialing is quick and intuitive with little to no delay.

Navigation between screens is simple when using the nav bar at the top and allows you to switch between your voicemail/sms inbox, the dialer, the sms writing page, google contacts, and settings.

To qualify the italic “almost” above, it should be mentioned that the difference lies in how you manage and access your contacts.

On the iPhone, the phone dialer has direct access to your phone’s contact list. The web app does not have such access, but it does have access to your google contacts. Getting a seamless integration of your iPhone’s contacts with google voice requires the extra step of syncing your iPhone contact list with google. As can be seen from the screenshots, I have not yet done this.

Bravo to google for giving us a usable google voice interface on the iPhone.