January 20th, 2009

Google iPhone interface is history

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 6:46 am

Categories: Google, Google Mobile, Uncategorized

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

When it was launched, Google made a big deal about the iPhone interface for their iGoogle — it actually looked really good, and worked just as well.

Search Engine Land reports that Google started redirecting people to the old, and ugly, mobile iGoogle page on Thursday, which immediately sparked a lot of discussion in this thread. Google never made any official announcements about the change, but this is what was said on the support page:

Hey everyone, I have an update for you. We’ve decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We’ve found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones — we want to ensure you’ll all see the same version.

Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren’t compatible with most mobile browsers.

We’ve got several articles in our Help Center about the mobile experience on iGoogle, which you can find in our Help Center (linked below).

It’s too bad that Google is beginning to think their convenience outweighs user experience.

November 15th, 2008

Google's iPhone voice search delayed too?

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 10:16 pm

Categories: Google, Google Mobile

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Voice, E-mail Providers, Cloud Computing, Text Messaging/SMS/MMS, Internet, Cellular Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology

It appears that we’ve got another false start our hands — Google’s new (and super cool sounding) voice search feature in their iPhone application is nowhere to be found. The New York Times reported that it would be available in the App Store “as soon as Friday”, but it’s still missing, and any reference to the new feature have been taken down by Google.

Something similar happened just two weeks ago too. A new feature in Gmail that let users send and receive SMS messages was released, then immediately taken back when a bug was discovered. That feature should be back in Gmail any day now if “two weeks” was an accurate estimation for a fix.

The reason for the iPhone application not showing up so quickly is still a bit of a mystery, but it’s likely got something to do with Apple’s approval process all applications must go through before they are added to the App Store. Some people speculate that Google may have been simply trying to persuade Apple to fast-track the approval process by making the YouTube video public, and seeding the New York Times with all the juicy details.

Unfortunately, we’re all going to have to wait for an unspecified amount of time before we can use the new iPhone app — but it’s still going to be worth it!

November 14th, 2008

Google lets you search with your voice on your iPhone

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:10 pm

Categories: Google Mobile

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Voice, Keyboards, Telecommunications, Hardware, Peripherals, Garett Rogers

Today Google announced that it will be pushing out an update for the Google application on the iPhone that lets users search with their voice rather than trying to use the on-screen keyboard. This voice search was likely made possible using the mounds of voice information they have been gathering with their 1-800-GOOG-411 service.

It’s interesting that Google is rolling out cool products like this for competing mobile devices like iPhone before their own, Android, but it does make sense. When you talk about getting rapid adoption, it doesn’t make sense to target less popular devices first, even when one happens to be your own.

You can find the free Google application in the iPhone App Store. Once you’ve either installed this application for the first time, or had it updated, you are ready to start searching with your voice. Launch the application, put it to your ear, then speak your search query to give this feature a try. It’s unclear how accurately it will translate voices into the correct words, but it’s no secret that they have been working on this technology for a long time.

Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard. — New York Times

I would expect that an equivalent feature will be available for Android before too long.

October 10th, 2008

Will you forget about Android?

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:30 am

Categories: Google, Google Mobile

Tags: Google Inc., Android, Cellular Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Garett Rogers

Chris O’Brien from the Silicon Valley Mercury News has an interesting article on why he thinks we will soon forget about Android. When you look at Android up against iPhone, you have to agree that it’s going to be a an uphill battle. But if anyone can do it, it would be Google right? Well, not exactly.

Out of all the products Google has launched, only two have achieved the level of success that they are hoping for with Android — and both were up against virtually nothing comparable when they started (Search and AdWords).

Android has lots of competition, but I don’t exactly agree with Chris. Google has a lot of potential on this one, and ironically, it’s probably a good thing if people “forget” about Android. Ideally, most handsets from most manufacturers will have the Android operating system installed — and if Google gets it their way, Android will just become a fact of life.

I agree that the quality (or at least the perception of quality) of applications you can find on Android aren’t as good as the ones in the iPhone App Store, but the barrier to entry for developers to make applications isn’t nearly as high either. We’ll see what happens! Do you think Google has a chance with Android?

August 9th, 2008

Google Translate for iPhone has lots of potential

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 12:00 pm

Categories: Google Mobile, Google Translate

Tags: apple iphone, google inc., speech recognition, emerging technologies, garett rogers

Google recently launched a new translation tool for iPhone that turns your device into a free (plus data costs) and very good pocket translator. That got me thinking though — Google has the technology, and ability to make this application far better than any other pocket translator, and a lot more useful than it is already.

[image from Google]

It’s no secret that Google launched 1-800-GOOG-411 to build their speech recognition capability. In fact, they have already implemented the fruits of their trained speech recognition engine in YouTube for political videos — but why does it have to stop there? Imagine being able to speak a phrase in English, and have it automatically translate it for you rather than having to type it? It could work the other way around too — when translating into languages with completely different character sets, why not have it speak it for you? Down the road, perhaps it wold be interesting to have your device listen to a conversation and provide real-time conversation logs in the language of your choice.

Mobile translation devices have the ability to change, and significantly improve the way we communicate with each other. Mind you, machine translation is far from perfect, but it’s getting better, and if anyone can create a way to make every language 100% understandable by everyone, it will be Google.

If executed properly, Google Translate for mobile devices could very well become the non-fiction version of a babel fish.

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-ike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy absorbing unconscious frequencies and excreting a matrix of conscious frequencies to the speech centres of the brain. the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you instantly understand anything said to you in any language. — The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

July 11th, 2008

Google's iPhone app is really good

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:52 pm

Categories: Google Mobile

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Mobile, App, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Garett Rogers

Google has created a brand new mobile app for the iPhone/iPod Touch that is currently available in the US App Store — apparently it will be available in other countries very soon. The app is more than a way to search the internet though, it lets a user search for everything a mobile user might be looking for.

I would have expected this application to search only the web, but in true Google style, they took it to the next level. You will find that Google presents you with smart results that include things like your search history, websites, your contact list and Google Maps. You are also given suggestions while you type to cut down on the time you need to spend typing.

If I was Microsoft, I would probably be kicking myself for not getting in on this iPhone action early — I don’t see any applications from them at all. If they let Google get too much of a lead in the mobile space, it will become another case of the catch up’s.

Overall, after playing with it for a while tonight, I really like the application — they have done a great job. Some reviewers in the App Store, however, are finding it difficult to figure out why Google would have bothered with this considering how easy it is to use Safari. I would argue that this app gives you a more integrated search experience, and I can see why they did it. Here is a YouTube video showing the app in action. What do you think?

May 1st, 2008

You can now use Google Apps on your iPhone

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 10:58 pm

Categories: Google, Google Apps, Google Mobile

Tags: Apple iPhone, Google Inc., Google Apps, Advertising & Promotion, Digital Music, Digital Media, Marketing, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics, Garett Rogers

Google just released a new interface for the iPhone/iPod Touch that lets Google Apps users easily access everything they need in an integrated environment. This new interface lets you use applications like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other services that aren’t associated with Google Apps like Google Reader, Google Notebook, Google News and Blogger.

If you have Google Apps for your domain, you can bookmark or set http://www.google.com/m/a/your-domain.com as your default page for quicker access to the information you find the most useful. This specific functionality is new, but the interface you will be using is actually a few months old. With regards to the interface, Google also announced today that it is now available in several languages. Since Google knows that mobile internet is going to be a big thing in the future, they have been increasing the amount of time and resources assigned to work on mobile related products.

The mobile interface for Google (be it using Apps or not) works great. I find that I use my iPod Touch to keep on top of daily routine tasks — then I use my laptop to do the heavy lifting. The majority of my time online is research, and who needs to use a real computer for that when the iPod/iPhone alternative is quicker, and is far more mobile?

March 22nd, 2008

New Google Mobile feature lets you search without typing

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 4:41 pm

Categories: Google Mobile

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

Google added a new entry into their robots.txt file — one way you can keep tabs on what Google doesn’t want to see. The new entry that forbids crawlers from seeing http://www.google.com/m/lcb made me naturally curious.

The new feature, that from what I can tell is new, lets you browse through categories of businesses without you having to type a word on your mobile device. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what “lcb” means, but everything is broken down into categories — there is even one for “Googleplex”. Strange, and pretty useless if you don’t live in Mountain View California.

The feature works pretty well, but it would be even better if it could somehow figure out your exact location rather than simply the city. This way it could browse real businesses that are close to you rather than everything in the entire city. Maybe if you pass in some weird parameters with latitude and longitude it will do exactly that, but I can’t confirm that at the moment.

Since this feature probably isn’t “finished” yet, I’ll leave most judgment out of this article, but it is promising. What do you think?

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.