Recently Google has been picking up the pace, sending out invites to its Google Voice service. Hit the link to see what the fuss is all about. In brief, Google Voice lets you manage all your contacts, calls, voice mail, forwarding numbers, etc through one Web-based interface. It's a pretty useful service, but one drawback has been that you have to dial into it in order to place calls. This is pretty clunky, as you then have to manually type in the phone number you are calling. However, if you own a Palm Pre, there are some new unofficial Google Voice homebrew client apps that you can sideload with minimal effort. One of these is called dkGoogleVoice.

DkGoogleVoice allows you to pick contacts from your Pre's native Contacts app and then dial or text the number into Google Voice. It's a slightly hacktastic solution, as it really just passes the task to the native dialer and then you have to push the green button to initiate the call. But it definitely works, and it is a major time saver.

The app also allows you to view your Google Voice History. You can pick an entry and choose to Call or SMS. Unfortunately, in my testing this feature often froze the app. However, this app has another feature which does work: it will show you the transcriptions of messages left in your Inbox. Nice!

I think dkGoogleVoice shows a lot of promise despite the bugs in its current iteration. It is useable, and if message transcription is important to you then this app is for you. It's a beta build, so your mileage may vary. Presumably the bugs will get squashed in future iterations.

Recently Google has been picking up the pace, sending out invites to its Google Voice service. Hit the link to see what the fuss is all about. In brief, Google Voice lets you manage all your contacts, calls, voice mail, forwarding numbers, etc through one Web-based interface. It's a pretty useful service, but one drawback has been that you have to dial into it in order to place calls. This is pretty clunky, as you then have to manually type in the phone number you are calling. However, if you own a Palm Pre, there are some new unofficial Google Voice homebrew client apps that you can sideload with minimal effort. One of these is called gDial Pro.

GDial Pro acts as a front end for Google Voice. You can pick contacts from your Pre's Contacts app, then have gDial Pro dial them into Google Voice for you. It's a slightly hacky solution, as gDial Pro hands off the task to the Pre's native dialer and then you have to push the green call button to initiate the call. It works though, and trust me - it will save you a whole lot of time and effort.

GDial Pro also lets you send an SMS and check your Google Voice History. It gives you the option to dial or text entries in your History. These are handy features to have on your cell phone.

GDial Pro lacks two features I'd like to see: a direct call to Google Voice Messages (Inbox) and Message Transcriptions. This is a beta app under continuing development, so I expect that more features may appear in the next iteration. My limited testing did not expose any bugs, but your mileage may vary.