Google Mobile App For Windows MobileGoogle Mobile App For Windows Mobile

Google has released yet another application for Windows Mobile this month, following on the heels of its Google Latitude and Google Sync for Mobile releases. Google Mobile App is a search bar for the home screen of your Windows Mobile device that allows you to quickly search the Internet. It also has 11 icons to launch other Google services on your device.One of the icons will launch the Google Maps application, which, if you've updated your copy recently, includes the Google Latitude social mapping service. Other icons will launch Web pages that will take you to mobile versions of Google Reader, Google Calendar, Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Orkut, and Google Documents. For now, Google Documents on Windows Mobile is a read-only service, but that may change in the near future. It's already allowing limited editing on the iPhone so other mobile platforms may not be far behind. Another icon launches the mobile version of Google News on your browser, where most of the links take you to mobile friendly sites. There's also an icon to launch Gmail in a mobile-friendly window. This can be handy for searching for older e-mails or e-mails you've archived from your in-box, but if you want to really use Gmail on your phone, you should enable POP3/IMAP4 support in Gmail's options from your PC and then follow the directions to set up the Windows Mobile messaging application to get your Gmail. IMAP4 works best because it allows you to synchronize your e-mail instead of just download it. That means if you mark it read on your phone, it will be marked read on your desktop. You can even move it to other folders on your phone and on your desktop, and it will appear as an archived e-mail with the label of the folder you moved it to. The final two icons just launch Web pages explaining how to use SMS to use Google search services and how to use the free 1-800-GOOG-411 voice service. The search feature of the app is really handy. You can just type in your search terms and Pocket Internet Explorer will open up and present you with the results. It maintains a history so you can just tap on a recent search term if desired. Of course, you can clear your history in the apps options. Google has really taken mobile devices seriously. I was afraid that once it launched Android, it would focus on that platform and everything else would go on the back burner. Instead, it seems Google has picked up its mobile development with a vengeance. I have to say, I have been a huge user of Microsoft products over the years, including Windows, Office, Money, Hotmail, and Messenger, but recently I've been lured over to Google for a number of services. IGoogle has been my home page for about two years now, and it gets more useful every time Google rolls out a new service. I type these blogs in Google Docs because it's easy to access from any PC to jot down some thoughts and I don't get bogged down in some of the formatting issues I run into in Word 2007. I can review the documents on my phone, and hope that editing isn't too far off in the future. While I still use Outlook for my work e-mail, I am synchronizing with Gmail calendar and so is my wife. We can see each other's calendars with ease, something we have been unable to do with Microsoft's Internet Calendar Service, which relies on the very finicky Windows Live ID, a service I personally loathe. Finally, my wife just started using Google Sync for Mobile on her T-Mobile Shadow. She loves not having to dock her phone with the PC to update new appointments. It really makes me wonder where we'll be in the next two years. Unless Microsoft gets its online presence in order, including picking a name for it and sticking with it, Google may take over in areas it's just now venturing into, and that includes mobile devices, even Microsoft's platform. It is especially striking to me that Google licensed Exchange ActiveSync from Microsoft to synchronize some Google information to your device while Microsoft doesn't even have a rumored product in the pipeline to provide a similar service. You can read more about the Google Mobile App here, which includes a short video on how it works and directions on getting it installed on your Windows Mobile phone.