San Francisco — Search engine goliath Google has lately been showing deep interest in Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform, and recently introduced its Google Street View service for Windows Mobile devices that offers street-level images of major cities on to the palm of your hand, but Google has released yet another goody application for Windows Mobile this month, following on the heels of its Google Latitude and Google Sync for Mobile releases.
Google Mobile App, offers a convenient one-stop shop for all your popular Google services, having a search bar for the home screen of your Windows Mobile device that allows you to quickly search the Internet, is now available to Windows Mobile, in addition to iPhone and RIM platforms. It also consists of 11 icons to launch other Google services on your device.
One of the icons will activate the Google Maps application, which, if you have recently updated your copy, which consists Google Latitude, the social mapping service. Other icons will start Web pages that will take you to mobile versions of Google Reader, Google Calendar, Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Orkut, and Google Documents.
But, presently Google Documents on Windows Mobile is a read-only service, which may change in the near future. It is 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.
Those who depend on Google’s search engine while on the go should be delighted to find searches conducted via Google Mobile App are faster than launching a browser, navigating to google.com, typing in the search query and navigating the results. Google claims its Google Mobile App can get search results 50% faster than this traditional navigating.
The application also features a search history available to cut down typing. Certainly, you can erase search history entries at any given time via the Options screen. Users can also setup the application with their Google Apps accounts in order to check for email, calendar and documents on their Google’s domains.
There is also an icon to start Gmail in a mobile-friendly window. This can be very convenient for searching for older e-mails or e-mails you have 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.
The last 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.
Unfortunately, the current version lacks a voice search capability, a feature which, to date, remains Google’s exclusive treat for only iPhone and iPod users.
Google Mobile App for Windows Mobile is available now for download from http://m.google.com/search on your Windows Mobile device. The application is available for all devices running Windows Mobile in the US, UK, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Pocket PC users can add the Google Mobile App to their start menu (Settings: Menus) or configure a hardware key (Settings: Buttons) to provide easy access from within any application on their phones.
Nokia’s S60 platform, and other proprietary operating system platforms from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung and Palm, also lack Google Mobile App, but it should be noted that users of these platforms can still access the most popular Google services separately.