Palm Wants To Embrace Google Voice, But It's Not Clear Google Wants To Embrace Palm
Suddenly Apple's competitors see a weakness in the iPhone, and it's Google Voice. 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.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Voice entered 2009 with expansive framing — coverage of its March launch described world-domination ambitions for a service that consolidates calling around a single number. Apple's rivals now treat it as an exploitable gap in the iPhone, where the app's absence is a visible weakness.
For Palm, the move fits its stated arc: the CEO has positioned webOS as bigger than just the Pre base, a second device is expected this year, and reporting in July suggested the Pre hadn't flopped. But both halves of the story are unconfirmed — the integration comes from a source close to Palm, and whether Google will partner at all remains unclear, echoing the carrier-connectivity questions that dogged Google's handset ambitions back in 2007.
First-order effects
- If the reported integration ships, Pre buyers who want Google Voice get native support that iPhone users cannot have, giving Palm an immediate differentiator at Apple's expense.
Second-order effects
- Any advantage is fragile: because Google owns Google Voice, rival Android licensees can match Palm's feature on their own devices unless Palm secures exclusivity — and carriers, wary of call-routing services, gain a new point of friction to negotiate over.
Third-order effects
- The episode tests a structural rule of the smartphone era: device makers no longer control their own differentiation when key features live in third-party services — the service owner holds veto power, making platform alliances conditional rather than durable.
The trend: Smartphone competition is shifting from hardware specs toward which web services an operating system can integrate, with the service owner — here Google — holding the decisive say.