It was just last spring that we saw Google Voice invites go out to a lucky few. The web-based service has gone on to provide over one million users with a single number to manage their communications. Now Google has opened up the service to all residents of the USA. The good people of less Googley nations will just have to hold tight.

Google Voice provides users with a new Google number that can be connected to multiple phone lines. Calling a Google Voice number will ring all phones connected with an account, but special scheduling rules can control which phones ring when. Google has been slowly rolling out new features to Voice in this last year. There is now a solid mobile web app for iPhone users, who are still prohibited from having a real app. Google has integrated voicemails into Gmail as well.

If you haven't used Google Voice, give it a shot. We are quite taken with the service around here. Even if you don't want to use the number, you can just use call forwarding to use Google's voicemail instead of your carrier's. You can also get free text messaging, and who doesn't want that? Users of Android phones will find some amazing integration with the service as well. Tell us about any Google Voice tips you have in the comments.

In the wake of the recent iPhone 4 announcement, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha is looking to reassure the Android faithful. Jha gave a talk at the Executives Club of Chicago yesterday and talked up the companies hardware plans. If the Motorola CEO is to be believed, we could see an Android phone packing a 2GHz CPU this year.

Jha was short on the details, but another Motorola executive apparently let it slip that they planned to incorporate every possible hardware feature into the upcoming superphone. This would mark a dramatic advancement in the rate of hardware iteration. Most manufacturers refrain from upping their specs so quickly to avoid destroying sales of their current smartphones.

While the idea of a 2GHz CPU sounds good on paper, we have to wonder if it will really deliver that much more performance than current CPUs. A lot of the snappiness in a smartphone is related to the software side of things. Don't even get us started on battery life. Do you think a 2GHz smartphone is necessary so soon?

AT&T has announced today that they are making some fairly big changes in the way they sell data. Gone are the $30 "unlimited" plans with the soft 5GB bandwidth cap. The changes affect smartphones as well as the iPad. Now mobile data will be sold in two packages. The DataPlus plan will cost $15 and offer 200MB of data a month. The DataPro plan will come with 2GB of data and run $25 per month.

The carrier is also changing how overages work, and this part of the plan actually sounds pretty reasonable. On the DataPlus plan, each additional 200MB block will run you $15, and each extra GB on the DataPro plan will be $10. The traditional overage fee amounted to $50 per GB of overage. AT&T also plans to finally offer tethering, but it will only be available on the DataPro plan. It will cost an extra $20 per month and it shares the same 2GB data allotment as the phone.

Users currently on the $30 plan are allowed to stay with it, but can move to the new plans at any time. These options may save money for most people, but some users may find themselves increasingly coming up against the caps. AT&T is currently only selling one Android phone directly, but these plans could be a problem for Google's mobile OS. Unlike the iPhone, Android based phones do a massive amount of background syncing of data. How do you feel about the changes? Would you end up saving of racking up overages?

We were a little worried that the change over to 4G mobile data standards like LTE and WiMAX would get expensive for consumers. ON the heels of Sprint's announcement that users of the EVO 4G would have to pay a $10 premium for data, Verizon is talking about a tiered pricing model for LTE data when it launches. Instead of allowing "unlimited" plans (5GB data cap), Big Red may instead charge different fees based on the amount of data used.

This might be a good deal for people that only use a little data, but in the future with much faster data connections, who's only going to use a little data? The thing to be aware of is that LTE data networks are expected to be much more efficient at delivering data. Carriers may only incur a half or one-third of the costs per megabyte of data on LTE as they do now. All things considered, we'd be surprised if even the cheap plans are a good deal.

Of course, we won't know how bad of a deal we're getting until LTE rolls out. Verizon is expecting the first round of LTE handsets to be available in early 2011. These will be LTE for data only, much like the EVO 4G uses WiMAX only for data. Verizon expects to be using LTE for voice calls by 2012. How much wireless data do you use in a month? Would you like a tiered pricing structure?