If you've been following coverage of Apple's rejection of Google Voice for iPhone, you saw TUAW blogger Chris Rawson considering whether pressure from AT&T might have been behind the Google Voice rejection -- an assumption first floated by TechCrunch and later substantiated by Daring Fireball. The absurd nature of the app removals is highlighted in the blog post from Riverturn, developers of VoiceCentral, which reports the conversation with an Apple representative.

Google Voice offers free call forwarding to your home, office, and cell, free Internet-accessible voice mail (with text transcription!), free SMS, and a single phone number for life. These free features compete against AT&T's revenue streams.

When it comes to "duplicate functionality", Apple doesn't seem to have any problem allowing applications like AT&T co-branded Virtual Recptionist (iTunes link) in App Store. Virtual Receptionist provides custom call forwarding to three phone numbers, in a similar manner to Google Voice.

In the wake of the rejection, sites like Wired, which should get credit for predicting this issue, have considered whether Apple's move might invite regulation due to the company's control over the App Store and possible anti-competitive concerns. A legislative response isn't out of the question should enough unhappy customers start petitioning their congressmen, especially in a political climate that encourages government intervention in private business. Granted, the iPhone isn't a monopoly among smartphones, but Apple does hold all the cards when it comes to app approval on the platform.

ChannelWeb's Rick Whiting (via the Wall Street Journal) points out that the US Department of Justice has "begun investigating whether large U.S. telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon Communications were engaging in anti-competitive behavior, including locking up the most popular handsets. The exclusive deal between AT&T-Apple is said to be drawing the most scrutiny." Whiting believes that AT&T and Apple may be drawing attention from a DOJ intent on cracking down on exactly this kind of excess. AT&T's tight relationship with Apple might be affecting how Apple runs App Store, as might be the case with the Google Voice rejection.

Pity the poor iPhone 3G owner who now has to grapple with reality; yes, what was until Friday the world's coolest smartphone is now simply a piece of yesterday's tech, as current as a punchcard and as enduring as a wax cylinder recording on a hot afternoon. No, not really -- the iPhone 3G is just as cool as it was a week ago, and for $99 it's a relative bargain. Still, there's some envy on the wind.

Some of our readers have apparently been so dazzled by Apple's enthusiastic promotion of the new iPhone 3G S that they were fooled into believing that the hardware-linked features of the 3G S (the compass and the voice controls, specifically) would be made available on the 3G with the delivery of the 3.0 software update. They have written to us, irate and frustrated, wanting to know what happened to their promised features. We sympathize, and we want to help.

There is, as it happens, a way to get one of the marquee features of the 3G S -- voice control -- onto your iPhone 3G or original iPhone. The vlingo app, available free in the App Store since December of last year and also available for Blackberry & Windows Mobile, gives you voice command dialing from your address book, map search, Yahoo web searches, Twitter/Facebook updating, and more. The recognition quality is quite good; it's worked as well as Google Voice Search for me in most cases.

Vlingo is quite a bit slower to recognize audio on the 3G than the built-in Voice Control is on the 3G S (unsurprisingly, considering the horsepower boost on the new phone); it also does not allow iTunes control, while Apple's tool does. Despite these drawbacks, it's fun to use and very slick. Update: As Eitan points out in the comments, vlingo's speed is not necessarily limited by the local processing power, since it depends on the remote server for audio analysis.

One of the major points of contention regarding vlingo, and a cause of many negative reviews on the App Store, is that the app does have to do something a little bit touchy in order to enable voice dialing: it asks if it can upload your contact names to vlingo. While this is a necessary step if you want to use voice dialing, and while the company says it does not include phone numbers with that upload nor does it use the information for any purpose other than creating spoken profiles to recognize the names of your contacts when you speak them, there are plenty of users who aren't comfortable with this step. If you're not OK with it, you can still use vlingo without the voice dialing feature; at that point, however, it's not dramatically better than Google's Voice Search.

You can watch a video demo of vlingo in the 2nd half of this post. If you've got other workarounds or third-party apps that help 3G owners level up with their happy 3G S comrades, please let us know.

My colleague Robert Palmer has reported that HearPlanet [app store link] is free for this week, so I downloaded and gave it a try. It is a nice surprise. HearPlanet for the iPhone and iPod touch is a pretty cool mash-up of detailed local information so you can search for a city, for example, and HearPlanet will tell you about all the things that are around you. There is detailed text, or better yet it will read the information to you.

Those with a 3G iPhone can use location services. HearPlanet will figure out where you are, and what things of interest are around you. The app finds items like museums, stadiums, zoos, and other landmarks or popular attractions. You click on one of the destinations, and the app starts reading about it. Some of the entries are short, others are quite detailed.

When you tap the play button HearPlanet switches you to speaker mode so you can share the information you're getting. It also makes it nice for car travel.

I wondered where all the information was coming from, and quickly found that most of the entries match the information in Wikipedia. In fact, if you scroll to the bottom of each text entry, the source of the information is identified. This has apparently confused some users of the app who thought the information from Wikipedia was stolen, but it is all properly identified and sourced.

Happily, HearPlanet is not U.S. only. There is plenty of information on destinations all over the world.

HearPlanet is not a complete travel app. There are no phone numbers and no links to Google Maps for directions to destinations. But it has lots of details on things around you that are worth visiting, and you'll certainly learn something in the process.

I've written blog posts on planes, on trains, and definitely in automobiles. This is the first time, however, that I've written a section of a post just using my voice. MacSpeech Dictate, version 1.2 (the firstthird version using the Dragon technology licensed from Nuance), released this week, is so much better than any previous Mac dictation system that I find I can't think fast enough to keep up with it.

The new MacSpeech version isn't cheap. For $200 you get the software on a CD and DVD, plus a Plantronics headset with a USB adapter (other microphone setups are available as options; I'm using it with a Sennheiser headset). It also has fairly steep system requirements -- you'll need an Intel Mac running 10.4.11/10.5.3 or higher. The software isn't problem free; it can get a little confused when you switch back and forth between dictation and typing, and the interface isn't exactly what I'd call streamlined... but the results are unbelievable.

Installation is quite straightforward. Run the app, adjust your headset volume, read about five minutes of training material; then you're ready to roll. Any application that accepts text input will work with the MacSpeech software. Your text appears just as though you had typed it from the keyboard. In my initial testing, accuracy is very, very good. Almost everything I say gets correctly interpreted by the software, so the recognition and correction tools aren't getting much of a workout yet. Later on I'll try some more complicated dictation tasks and see how it goes.

Having to announce each punctuation mark and speak like a newscaster could easily get old, and my coworkers may not appreciate me dictating everything every day. I can't deny, however, that there is something truly magical about the power of MacSpeech Dictate. Spell words it doesn't recognize, add custom words to the vocabulary (including entire text documents already written)... just awesome.

Back to the keyboard -- I can definitely type faster than I can dictate (at least, so far) and other formatting tasks are much easier with a hand on the mouse. Still, for anyone who faces challenges using traditional inputs methods due to RSI or other restrictions, this new version is definitely worth a close look.