That’s right. Apple has lifted the restrictions for developers so that they can write VOIP apps that work over AT&T’s 3G network. Back in October, AT&T lifted the restriction on their network and informed Apple and the FCC about it.

Yesterday, Apple released a new SDK for the iPhone and the new iPad. In this SDK, the restriction has been lifted. iCall has already updated their iPhone app, and many others will soon follow no doubt.

I’ll be curious to watch and see how much (or even if) AT&T complains about this extra data usage on their network.

Much has been rumored about the existence of this device, and today it came to fruition. The iPad has a 9.7 inch diagonal touch screen. The interface is much like that of the iPhone.

In fact, ‘most’ of the apps currently in the App Store will run on the iPad. They can run either in their native resolution, meaning they’ll use a small area of the center of the screen. Or, they can run at full screen, essentially doubling the size of the app resolution. Those apps will surely feel clunky to use, so it would benefit most of the developers to write a native version for the iPad. That will be a lot of work…

Will it catch on? Steve Jobs seems to think so. The price point for the device is pretty attractive – $499 for the lowest end. It has 16 GB of storage and no 3G.

For more detailed info on this new device, take a look over at Gizmodo’s ‘everything you need to know‘ article.

Most of you know by now that I’m a Google fan. I like their products. They’re innovative, geeky and cool all at the same time.

At last, there is a full-fledged Google Voice App for the iPhone. There is no push notification for this app, however. The reason? It is a web app. But it’s actually a nice web app written by Google themselves.

The difference between this app and their previous (ugly) mobile web app is that this one is done in HTML5 and functions just like a native iPhone app. It is very fast, and feels like a regular app sitting right on my device.

For anyone who hasn’t kept up with the whole ‘Google Voice on iPhone’ issue, Apple has pretty much all but rejected the native app that Google submitted to the app store. There were other apps out there, which were all pulled from the store at the same time. One of the developers made his app available on the black market for jailbroken iPhones so that his development time wasn’t a total waste.

Another clever developer began working on an HTML5 app, much like the one Google has written. I signed up for the app’s beta, VoiceCentral Black Swan Edition, but never received an invite. It doesn’t matter any more, because we have another one available now, straight from the source.

In true Google fashion, here is a video explaining how everything works.

Skype has announced a new beta for their Linux client. Linux doesn’t see many updates from them, but when they come out, they’re usually pretty significant. Of note in this release:

• Screen Sharing
• Quote a message in chat
• UI Styling

There are apparently still some audio bugs in this otherwise nice Linux client. Let me know what you think.

As if to immediately follow suit, Vimeo announced yesterday that they were making an HTML5 player available. It is beta, possibly a step up from YouTube’s ‘experimental’ player. (Knowing Google, experimental is RC material though.)

There are some limitations with Vimeo’s player as well. You must be using Safari, Chrome or IE with ChromeFrame installed, just like with YouTube. No full screen, like YouTube. Sensing a trend here?

For full screen, I’m not certain if it’s a limitation of current browsers, or if the HTML5 standard isn’t quite there (I lean toward the browsers). But either way, this is a nice step forward in moving away from flash.

Vimeo says that 90% of the videos uploaded in the past year are available to watch using the HTML5 player. 35% overall are available.

YouTube has announced an experimental version of an HTML5 supported player for their videos. Most of them, anyway. It doesn’t support videos with ads, captions or annotations. It also requires that you’re using a browser that supports the <video> tag, and h.264 encoded videos.

So, Safari and Chrome work for this, as does Internet Explorer, as long as ChromeFrame is installed.

To try it out, visit this page and click the link at the bottom that says “Join the HTML5 Beta”, and you’re set. If the video doesn’t have the limitations mentioned earlier, you’ll be watching using the brand spankin’ new HTML5 player.

For the record, in my initial tests on my MacBook Pro, I noticed a significant difference in CPU utilization between the Flash player and the HTML5 player. Apparently Flash has had this issue with Mac’s across the board. I’ll watch a somewhat lengthy YouTube video and notice my fans start spinning up and my laptop heating up. No more, with HTML5. Not to mention, it’s the new standard.

Well, sort of. If you have a Mac, and if you have iLife, you have iWeb. Most of you have probably at least opened up iWeb to see what it was all about, and maybe you’ve even created a website, but don’t have anywhere to host it.

Steven Sande, over at TUAW, has written an interesting article to get you over that last hurdle – hosting. You can have a website, out on the Internet where everybody can see it, for free. That’s right – free hosting. The host? Dropbox.

Dropbox is a tool built to sync files between computers by using a central repository. A client loaded on each PC/Mac/whatever will keep those files synchronized. So how do you use it for hosting? You can get a public link to a file, say, index.html, and send that out.

It isn’t pretty, but it’s free, and is perfect for sharing stuff on a web page between family and friends.

You can find the article, with step-by-step instructions, here.

I recently was fortunate enough to acquire an invitation to the Google Wave preview. It is still invitation-only (and no, I don’t have any invites – yet), so unfortunately you can’t just go and sign up right now. If you’re patient enough, you can get your hands on an invite also – I see quite a few invites being handed out all the time on Twitter if you want to try there.

So, what do I think? Well, once all of the kinks are worked out, it can (and probably will, knowing Google) be an extremely powerful tool for everything from businesses to individuals to collaborate on everything from presentations to documents to planning trips and sharing photos.

First I’ll talk about the bad.

• When there are several people in a single wave, things are pretty hard to keep track of if they’re all updating at once. It also seems to slow the browser down to a crawl while it tries to keep up with everything coming in. A search for “with:public” at the height of activity will also slow things down a bit.
• There is no way to prohibit replies or remove someone from a wave. There is no rights management of any sort. I’m sure Google has this on their list of things to do to make Google Wave better, but for right now, it is nonexistent.
• Lots of gadgets in a wave will bog things down. I found one public wave where everyone was sharing their Twitter usernames. There are 26 maps from what I could tell. One for a username starting with each letter of the alphabet. With that many maps, my machine couldn’t load the entire wave, and none of the map gadgets showed up.

It’s possible that my machine just couldn’t handle some of these things, but I don’t think so – I’m on a MacBook Pro with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM. I have decent bandwidth, so that shouldn’t be an issue either. I’ve seen some tweets about people disliking Google Wave’s performance, so I’m sure that is being worked on as well.

The good:

• Again, I see a ton of potential for this to be huge. When people get a grip on what all they can do with this tool, and Google finally opens it up to the general public, it’ll grow.
• Google is encouraging development by 3rd parties, much like they did with Google Maps. They want people to be able to do anything with this tool. There are already some pretty nifty gadgets available, and people are writing ‘bots’ to do some cool stuff like converting lazy people’s text speak to real English to keep things cleaned up.

Have you been able to get in on Google Wave? What do you think about it? Let me know in the comments!

Remember when you first got your iPhone, you were told that setting up fetch email could drain your battery faster? No? Well maybe I’m just a little too particular about all that stuff. I still had mine set to fetch every 15 minutes, and I had to charge my phone daily. Not to mention you could be getting important emails 15 minutes later than you’d like to see them.

Google has the answer. They have updated their sync help to include mail. Previously you could only sync Calendar and Contacts items with their sync service. Now you get push email.

It’s sort of ironic, however, that all of this is done through the Microsoft Exchange mail options in your iPhone. Hey, as long as it works, that’s cool with me. And I don’t have to pay any extra for it.

Will this change my battery longevity? I sort of doubt it, but I’m a little curious to see.

Well, AT&T has finally promised a date that MMS will be turned on for our iPhones in the US. Mark your calendars – September 25 appears to be the day. They did promise late Summer, and Fall starts on September 22. They only missed it by 3 days.

My only gripe is that they should’ve been ready when Apple was ready with the 3.0 update for the iPhone. It took long enough for Apple to get their act together on MMS. AT&T saw it coming but took their sweet time to get things ready on their end.

Finally, the iPhone will have a fundamental feature that every other (reasonably current) wireless phone on the planet already has.