Since more people have mobile phones than computers, search giant Google has boosted its mobile features with a new mobile version of Google Calendar, that lets them view appointments registered in their Google Calendar from handsets with Internet capability.
Google announced the new feature in a posting on its official blog site from Devesh Parekh, Software Engineer, Google Calendar team, who said: “We realize that more people in the world have mobile phones than have computers, and people take their cell phones with them everywhere.” With the latest service, Google Calendar users will be able to access their schedules from their cell phones.
Since one of our main goals on the Calendar team is to make planning your events and maintaining your schedule as easy as possible, starting today, you can access your Google Calendar account from your cell phone!
When users log on to Google Calander from their Web-capable mobile phone, they see appoints complete with date, time, location, description and guest list — all formatted in a way for easy reading on small screens. Users can scroll through the day’s events, and also previous and forthcoming events.
What’s more, the new Google Calendar service offers a link to Google Maps to find directions, along with an option to add new appointments. However, it does not have the useful option for changing or deleting existing appointments, according to reports.
The company claimed that any user with a Google calendar account could use GooSync from UK based Toffa International Limited, a developer of mobile synchronization products, to wirelessly synchronize their appointments and events to their mobile device. GooSync has been running as a worldwide open beta with more than 15,000 users since October 2006.
The service is based on Toffa’s commercial synchronization engine, SyncWiseLive, which supports industry open standards (SyncML). Therefore, according to Toffa, GooSync is compliant with all of the latest mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). A list of compatible devices is available.
The new mobile service should perhaps be useful for users of Google Calendar who use the online service as their primary scheduling tool, but could on the other hand prove inept and restricted for smart phone owners who can more quickly and easily synchronize their complete Outlook or Lotus Notes calendars with their computers.
Google said mobile users can point their phone to www.calendar.google.com. The service is free excluding carrier data charges. Toffa’s service is also free, but offers only a limited range of options, for full synchronization capability users must pay for an advanced account.
Another issue is cost: Although the new service itself costs nothing, users must be online to use it and, depending on their mobile data tariff, data connection fees can soon add up.