Google mobile offerings

Google has brought out two new products for mobiles in the past week, designed to make browsing the internet from mobiles easier and cooler.

First up, the mobile version of the google.com/ig personalised homepage. Same content available as on the computer version, except obviously without all the widgets. Google Blog had this to say about it:

Anyone who's ever tried to browse the web on their cell phone knows that it isn't always the best user experience. That's why I'm excited to tell you about Google Mobile Personalized Home. We've designed a way for you to view the things that you really care about, from your Gmail inbox to news headlines, weather, stock quotes, and feeds (Atom or RSS). The interface is optimized for small screens, and we've arranged things so you don't have to click on a bunch of links to locate what you're after -– your personalized content appears on top, right where it should be. Give it a try, and let us know how you like it.

It looks quite good, and I reckon its quite useful to have all the feeds, particularly, as sometimes when I'm bored on the bus or something its nice to have something to read.

Next is a product that could have been around for a while, but I've certainly not seen it before. I heard about it on Google Blogoscoped. Its simply a proxy that converts any webpage into an optimized version for mobile. Just point your mobile's browser to http://www.google.com/gwt/n and type in the web adress. It also gives the option to not download images, which will certainly help to curtail bandwith costs.

Google also have Google Local for Mobile beta running, although that's only available to US users at the moment. They've obviously decided that their mission is not only to organise all the world's information, but to make it available on mobiles as well! Obviously no matter how much great technology they develop, mobile web browsing will always be inherently limited because of the relatively tiny screens on which all the information has to be squeezed. Still, I'm certainly not complaining.