Reject this
For so long Apple and Google have been viewed as the golden boys of the tech industry - sticking it to big, bad bully Microsoft. But in case you hadn't noticed, neither of them is small, nor necessarily good, anymore.
Until recently, Apple and Google have been able to coexist. While Apple has continued to fight Microsoft on the operating system front, Google has been content to own the search engine space and seek to undermine Microsoft in the productivity software market.
That all changed once everyone realised that the key technology battleground of the foreseeable future was mobile Internet. Apple got there first with the iPhone, but in the past year Google has been very aggressive, both with Android and in the software and services sectors. Apple's got no problem with Google offering productivity apps for free, but when it starts messing with the iPhone, that's a different matter.
So last September we had the story that Apple had rejected the Google Voice app for the iPhone. The reason, Google revealed, was that the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone and that wasn't cool. You could still access Google Voice via a mobile browser, but with reduced functionality.
Today, Google launched a new Google Voice app for iPhone OS 3.0 and Palm WebOS, which uses HTML 5 to offer functionality a lot closer to the rejected app. As a precedent, it's an interesting move, because Apple likes to excercise a fair bit of control over what appears on its devices. However, it has no control over what people do through their browsers.
This is also what you would expect from Google anyway, which is at its best when offering cloud-based services that you access through your browser. Here's Google's video describing what it's all about. Right now it's still only available in the US.
