• GigaOm, Wednesday, July 15, 2009 1:30 PM

Google this week announced that it was bringing its Google Voice mobile app to BlackBerry and Android phones. The mobile versions of the Google Voice service will allow users to access and playback voice mails, send and receive text messages and read transcripts in addition to making local and long distance calls from mobile phones. The apps are fully integrated with each phone's contacts, so you can make calls through Google voice straight from your address book. To use the service, users need to have a data connection, but it isn't necessary to have a Wi-Fi connection to place and receive calls. Recipients of these calls will see your Google voice number displayed, not your cell number.

"The Google Voice app essentially reduces the cell phone carrier to a dumb pipe," says GigaOm writer Om Malik. He adds that the Android app "is so tightly enmeshed with Android OS and the address book and other apps, you hardly think that you're using Google Voice." In fact, one of the options you're given when setting up the app is to make all calls through Google Voice. This is Google trying to become your phone company, Malik says. "If Google bundles the Google Voice app with Android and sells it to makers of cheaper feature phones, it can start to insert itself between the consumers and wireless companies." Google loves this "man in the middle" position, Malik says, having profited handsomely from inserting itself between consumers and information through its search offering. "In this summer of a lot of hot air from Google - Google Wave and Google Chrome OS, for example -- this is the first interesting product with larger implications," he says.

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