Google Voice Webapp review

Update: Google Voice has now been released in the App Store. You should use the app on your iPhone as opposed to this web based version if you can.

After being denied access to the App Store, Google Voice has finally come in through the front door, using a powerful and easy to use webapp. Google Voice can now be accessed from your iPhone or iPod touch using its newly redesigned and optimized web application that looks and works great on the Mobile Safari web browser. In addition you can use the “Add to Homescreen” option to install the Google Voice icon to your SpringBoard for quicker access. Now you can listen to your Google Voice messages, read the transcripts, call anyone on your Google Contacts, send out SMS messages, and customize your Google Voice settings, pretty easily and quickly using the official GV webapp.

The Google Voice iPhone webapp gives you access to your Inbox using a handy drop down menu that lets you filter your call history, Starred items, Voicemail, SMS, Placed (Outgoing), Recieved, Missed, and Recorded calls. You can easily read your voicmail transcripts and even play back the audio version of the message using the iPhone’s built in medial player, and this works over 3G as well. From the message view you can also call, SMS, delete, archive or mark as undread using a nice hover over menu.

The dialer screen has a nice numeric layout with big buttons and options to “Call” or “SMS” after a phone number is entered. Don’t know the phone number? Tap the contacts tap and see a list of your Top contacted friends as automatically filtered by frequency. You can also view all your Contacts and even search by keyword in real time. If you sync your iPhone with Google Contacts, now you’ll have all your iPhone contacts in your Google Voice webapp at all times.

Finally GV webapp gives you access to a plethora of settings categorized under the tool menu under General, Phones, Do not disturb, Credit, and My number. Some of the options include SMS Forwarding, Call Screeing, Call Forwarding, and more.

Some of the things you can’t do with the iPhone web app right now are creating new contacts, blocking calls, adding notes, and adding credit to your account. You also can’t search your messages by keyword, which would be a big plus. Finally you don’t see your trash or spam folders in the web based iPhone version of Google Voice.

Overall, this is probably as close to a Google Voice iPhone app you can get, and given it is web based, its free, it never needs to be approved by anyone, and updates can be rolled out at will as needed by Google.

Access this Google Voice webapp by going to http://voice.google.com from Safari on your iPhone or iPod touch, and soon to be iPad device.

AppSafari review of Google Voice Webapp was written by Joe Seifi on January 27th, 2010 and categorized under Chat, Contacts, Featured, Phone, Utilities, VOIP. Page viewed 12181 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.