According to sources inside the company, Palm is ready to cash in on the iPhone's Google Voice rejection nightmare with a full app for the Pre. According to sources within the company, Google has no idea that this is happening.
It's one of the weirder stories I've read this week, but also one of the more interesting ones. From Techcrunch:
We've heard from a source close to Palm that the company plans to roll out deep integration with Google Voice on the Pre phones for users who want it
...
But our understanding from other sources is that Google only intends to roll out a browser based version of the service for Pre, which lacks the deep integration with native apps like the dialer and contacts. The user experience isn't nearly as good.
This is woven into a longer discussion about how Google Voice apps need to be deeply integrated into the user's OS to work properly, and how they need to build Google Voice apps, since there's no official SDK. It's all interesting to think about, but I feel like there's an obvious, missed conclusion here: Isn't development for the Pre pretty restricted? I mean, given that WebOS apps are essentially super-beefed-up web apps, a Mojo SDK app would more or less be a web app—not the kind of core-functionality-replacing experience that you can get on Android.
The only way around this is to appeal directly to Palm for access to the Pre's core Linux APIs, like Telenav did for their Sprint-branded nav app, or for Palm to make the app, and appeal to Google for special dev tools, but that level of cooperation doesn't really sound like what's going on here, assuming Techcrunch's sources aren't just making shit up. (This happens!) So anyway, next month: Sprint, Palm and Google answer the FCC's questions about why their Google Voice web app MURDERS PEOPLE, for no reason. Fun will be had by all. [Techcrunch]