GOOGLE ISN’T A company that’s afraid to take on the competition with its many web based services and its latest addition allows you to make voice calls for free from within Gmail. Ok, so it’s a limited time offer until the end of the year and it only applies to calls initiated from within the US to phone numbers in the US or Canada.
It’s still not clear if Google’s voice service will roll out into other regions, but considering that it’s an extension of Google Voice, it’s not likely to happen before Google Voice gets rolled out in other regions. Google offers paid for calls to regions outside of the US, for a small fee. Parts of Europe and Asia as well as Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Mexico, Brazil and a few other countries can be called for as little as 2 cents per minute which seems like a very competitive rate. A full list of call rates can be found here and it’s worth nothing that it costs more to call cell phones outside of the US than it costs to call land lines. The free calls are also limited until the end of the year.
The integration of Google Voice into Gmail shows how Google works to bring its applications together into a single point of access. In this case it seems to be a sensible integration that makes it easier to use yet another service from Google. Like it or not, but Google is here to stay and they’re not going to stop adding new features and services to their already existing ones.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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