March 4th, 2008

Google releases Gears for mobile devices

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 5:57 am

Categories: Google Mobile

Tags: Google Inc., Google Gears, Mobile, Mobile Device, Advertising & Promotion, Web Browsers, Marketing, Internet, Garett Rogers

Google Gears is a plugin that you can download for your browser (if you use Internet Explorer or Firefox) that lets you use and interact with compatible websites while you are offline. It is a great tool that developers can make use of — however it’s still in it’s early stages and it’s not widely adopted yet.

Today Google launched Gears for mobile devices. It only runs on Internet Explorer Mobile, so those of you using Opera Mini or WebKit are left out in the cold for now. I wouldn’t imagine Google will completely ignore these two browsers as Opera is a major player, and WebKit powers mobile browsing in Android.

Google posted a torrent of “official” blog posts about the new product this morning, and in the one from the Google Code guys, they even announced their intentions to support “Android and other mobile platforms with capable web browsers”.

Click here to watch an interview with the Google Gears for Mobile team.

January 14th, 2008

Google Launches new iPhone interface

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:52 am

Categories: Google Mobile

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., iGoogle, E-mail Providers, E-mail, Keyboards, Internet, Online Communications, Hardware, Peripherals

Last week I blogged about a new iGoogle interface for the iPhone — and like I thought, it’s going to be part of a new, improved iPhone “dashboard”. This new application, launched today at MacWorld, has a lot of new features that make using it on the iPhone more pleasant. To use the new application, visit www.google.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch. Some of the new features described in the press release:

• Improved UI: The applications look and feel slicker, and they are easier to activate, navigate and use via a touch-screen.
• Customization of default tabs: Now Google users can have easy access to their favorite applications by customizing the applications that appear on the Google.com menu bar. Users simply choose their favorite Google applications to bring them to the front menu, ensuring that they’ll be close at hand whenever they’re needed. Switching between applications is effortless, as users only need to sign in once to access their Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Docs, and Picasa accounts.
• Speedier Gmail: New emails will automatically show up so there’s no need to manually refresh inboxes. And the new auto-complete feature for contacts makes composing emails faster than ever.
• Speedier Calendar: With our new month view, users can glance at an entire month of appointments.
• iGoogle: Now Google users can access their iGoogle gadgets on the iPhone. Everything they’ve customized on their iGoogle homepage including weather, stocks, and news feeds now appear on their iPhones. To go to iGoogle, simply click on the iGoogle link on the Home tab. You can customize your iGoogle page on your computer at www.igoogle.com.

One reason Google is likely putting so much time into the iPhone is because anything they do can be run natively on any phone using Android — Google’s mobile phone operating system. Android uses “WebKit”, the same web engine used on the iPhone.

December 12th, 2007

Google takes a stab at Exchange and BES

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:29 pm

Categories: Google Mobile

Tags: Google Inc., Handhelds, Hardware, Garett Rogers

It doesn’t work for email yet, but Google launched their BlackBerry sync application for Google Calendar. Now when you create events on either your device, or through the service itself, everything stays up-to-date.

The new sync application works with both the traditional Google Calendar service, and the one you can find in your Google Apps account for your domain — this means it can now be used to replace Outlook + Exchange + BES for your calendaring needs. Even though the application solves a huge problem, it’s still a bit slow — by default it will only sync every two hours, which seems like decades compared with the performance you get with push technology.

If you have a BlackBerry, visit http://m.google.com/sync from your device to download and install the application.

[via Google Operating System]

September 28th, 2007

Google buys Zingku, takes social mobile

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:20 am

Categories: Google Mobile, Acquisition

Tags: Google Inc., Mobile, Zingku, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Garett Rogers

Google has acquired Zingku, a little known Boston startup that touts their mobile social platform targeted at teens to twenty-somethings. New signups for the service have been frozen since Google announced the acquisition — but current account holders will not see any change in service if they want to keep their account.

What does Zingku actually do though? Well, the only information I have is from their website — and it’s not particularly helpful. By the sound of it though, Zingku takes full advantage of SMS — making it easy for anyone who has a mobile phone to participate. This SMS service integrates with their companion browser-based service to make it easy to share things with other people in your network. Unlike most social services, instead of developing a website and adding a mobile layer on top, they created the social service with mobile devices being their targeted platform from the beginning.

Our service is designed from the mobile phone, outward, allowing you to create and exchange things of interest ranging from invitations to “mobile flyers” with friends in a trusted manner. On the mobile phone, Zingku uses standard text messaging features that come with every phone. On the web, our service uses your standard web browser and instant messenger. There is nothing to install.

Google has been pushing out services that not only function, but function well, on mobile devices at a faster rate than ever before. This is just another example of how serious Google is when it comes to mobile applications.

September 24th, 2007

Gmail Mobile was updated today

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:02 pm

Categories: Gmail, Google Mobile

Tags:

It seems as though Gmail Mobile went through a serious update within the last day. The previous mobile version was quite ugly and pretty much makes you want to stay away. The new version is true to the spirit of Gmail with an intuitive interface and a nice clean layout.

This comes the same day Google announced the iPhone version of Google Calendar. It looks like Google is getting deeper and deeper into developing applications that belong on mobile devices — it’s too bad data plans, at least in Canada, will run you about $100 a month.

[Thanks David, Google Operating System]

September 10th, 2007

Google Docs mobile now available?

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:37 am

Categories: Google Docs, Google Mobile

Tags: Google Inc., Google Docs, Mobile, Garett Rogers

About a week ago, there was an interesting discussion going on in the Blogoscoped forums about what appears to be a mobile version of Google Docs. Today, Steve Rubel noticed that when he goes to Google Docs on his iPhone, there is a link at the bottom that pointed to http://docs.google.com/m — usually a good indication of a mobile offering.

Now the question is, will it only be for iPhone? I don’t think there are many other mobile devices that can handle (or at least that you would want to handle) a full read/write version of Google’s word processor or spreadsheet service, but a read-only version could likely be made to work on all mobile devices.

March 27th, 2007

Google Mobile Search for the win!

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:28 am

Categories: Google, Google Mobile

Tags:

Google made public several key changes to their mobile search offering this morning — use your mobile phone to visit google.com or click here to see the updated product.

I can't help but wonder if the timing on announcing these changes could be linked to Yahoo's victory dance last week.  I have been testing out both products this morning, and I can tell you Google's is very good — I'd say better than Yahoo.

The personalized homepage helps me find what interests me without clicking or searching anything — the information it shows me is location-based so I can see things like movie listings and weather right on the main page.  Yahoo requires at least three clicks to get my weather information and two to find movie times for my favorite theater.

When I actually want to search for something, the new algorithm can guess what kind of information I am looking for and show me relevant information rather than simply web results like before.  Yahoo has a similar offering in their mobile product.

Overall, this new product will meet the need for most people wanting to search for something while on the go.  I would say this is a drastic improvement over the version it replaced and could easily steal some users from Yahoo.

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