Google Makes iGoogle Available On The iPhoneGoogle Makes iGoogle Available On The iPhone

Google has made yet another one of its services available on the iPhone, this time the popular iGoogle customizable Web page. I decided to take it for a quick spin. Is it worth checking out? It is and it isn't. Here's why.First, if you've spent time customizing iGoogle already, and like the way it's laid out on your PC, you may be interested in using iGoogle on the iPhone. All the information you've dropped into your iGoogle page will make its way to your iPhone's browser if you point it to http://www.google.com/ig/i. At first, you may think this sounds great. And it is. But it's not nearly as usable as the desktop version of iGoogle. But that's not the iPhone's fault, nor Google's. It's the screen size.

IGoogle is made for standard browsers being used on standard 13- to 21-inch monitors. It runs three columns across and as many down as it takes to fit in all the customized sites you've chosen. On my iGoogle page, for example, I can read headlines from 15 different sites and/or publications. It gives me a very fast way to glance at 45 headlines almost instantly. That's just not possible on the iPhone or any other mobile device. The screens just aren't capable of displaying that much information. What you get instead is a long column of content that forces you to scroll ever downward to reach the bottom. That's not to say that iGoogle on the iPhone is a failure.

Launching iGoogle on the iPhone is as simple as pointing your browser to the above link and signing in. It will then display the headlines from your top three news sources in the browser, with the rest of your feeds listed below. So if, for example, you have five news sources, (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Weather.com, and -- of course -- information), you will see the headlines from the first three, but just the names of the last two sources. Clicking on the closed sources opens up the list of headlines so they can be read. It's all very natural to use.

Is it a good way to grab your own, customized information? You betcha. Especially if you've got tons of info built into your iGoogle site. But if you happen to use Google's RSS Reader -- which is built into the Google home page for the iPhone -- it's a moot point. It's often faster to access the most recent information in your feeds directly from the Google page than it is to jump into iGoogle.

Either way, Google is letting iPhone users access their information in whichever way they want. Which is a lot more than we can say for Yahoo right now...