PreCentral: Send Google Voice message to ANY contact with SynerGV 2

[News Reporter]

SynergGV 2, by Eric Blade, allows you to send and receive Google Voice messages directly in the stock Messaging app on your TouchPad (or

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), but has a pretty big limitation in that you can only initiate a conversation to someone in your Google Voice contacts list or by manually typing in the entire phone number. If you keep all your contacts in Google, this is a nonissue, but if you use your Palm Profile or Facebook to keep track of phone numbers, you are out of luck. That is, unless you know a little trick to initiate a conversation to anyone in your contact list, regardless of which synergy account they reside in.

Unfortunately, you can not use to search for your contact, nor can you open an existing conversation with that contact.  In addition, this new Google Voice messaging conversation that you are about to create will not be integrated into that existing conversation like all other do, but will rather remain as a separate thread unless and until you add that contact and their associated phone number to your Google contacts.  Regardless, to send the Google Voice message to any contact, just follow the directions below

1. Open up the Messaging app
2. Tap the  icon to create a new message
3. Do a and then tap on the number you want to send a Google Voice message to.
4. You will see that the contact's name, and not their number, should be listed in the "To" field.  Tap on that name to display the number.
   • On the TouchPad, the number should be highlighted. Tap at the end of the number to place the cursor at the end of the number and then press the space bar
   • On phones, the cursor should already be at the beginning of the number. Just press the space bar once
5. Once you do that, the number will no longer be associated with your contact, but instead webOS will just think that it’s a number you manually entered. All you need to do is tap the  icon in the "IM WITH "(XXX) XXX-XXXX" USING" to address your Google Voice message with that contact

As stated above, if you don't want to go through this hassle you just need to to your Google account and you should be able message with them directly in the future. Note, though, that this will not be available immediately as you need to wait for webOS to sync back between your Google and Google Voice accounts before it will show in your SynerGV account on your device.

is available in the webOS App Catalog for $4.99 and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 3.0 or higher. If you know how to use , you can install SynerGV on devices running 2.1 or higher after it was purchased on a TouchPad.