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December 4, 2007

Google Pre-Launches New iPhone Interface

Michael Arrington

83 comments »

We heard a rumor that Google was going to launch a new interface for users accessing the site via an iPhone in the next few days. But an anonymous tip let us know it actually launched without any warning or announcement this evening.

If you visit Google.com from an iPhone, you now get a menu of services to choose from - home (search box), Gmail, Calendar, Reader and More (docs, sms, goog-411, news, photos, blogger and notebook). It’s basically all of the core Google services, accessible from a single easy to use menu.

The new application has what is now considered a signature look for the iPhone. The look and feel of many of the interface elements are similar to those created by Joe Hewitt, whose sample framework and code have been used in dozens of iPhone applications (see his Facebook product here). I don’t know if Google used any of his freely offered code, but it certainly has the look of one of his applications.

Accessing the site through other mobile devices continues to deliver the old Google Mobile interface.

More pictures of the interface are below, created with a simulator. Real but poor quality images are here.



  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Renato A

    December 4th, 2007 at 9:42 pm

    Amazon also has abeta web only for iPhone.
    (sent from my iPhone)

  2. Don Wilson

    December 4th, 2007 at 9:44 pm

    Sort of disappointing. Everything in Gmail looks horrible outside of the inbox listing. Preferences tab loads a new window to the full size preference page? Contacts list are just pure html links, completely uneditable?

    What is this? Hopefully not a serious attempt at a usable iPhone app.

  3. Doug

    December 4th, 2007 at 9:44 pm

    Not only does Google know all your surfing habits, they will soon know who, what, and where you call. Kinda scary.

  4. pamon

    December 4th, 2007 at 9:45 pm

    This is pretty sweet. Nice integration of all the G services. On WI-FI it’s quick and loads fast. Nice job G.

  5. Judson

    December 4th, 2007 at 9:45 pm

    The interface is really alarmingly fast!

  6. Brian

    December 4th, 2007 at 9:47 pm

    One thing i used to like about Google mobile was the mobile version of my iGoogle. With this update I lose all of that and have to go to the full version of iGoogle to see my custom home page. Hopefully they bring that content back to this iPhone version.

  7. step

    December 4th, 2007 at 9:49 pm

    /cry

    I’m so sick it working for the iPhone, but not the iPod Touch. Not all of us countries have iPhone’s yet. c’mon google!

  8. Prashanth

    December 4th, 2007 at 9:52 pm

    This will be an additional reach point for Google . More users and more ads !!

  9. Fourbin

    December 4th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

    This looks like the iPhone optimized Google that has been around for a few weeks now except the addition of that new nav bar across the top. What else is different Michael?

  10. Vinod

    December 4th, 2007 at 10:11 pm

    Mine always reverts to google.co.in and this new interface is not available yet on iPhone.

  11. Ben M

    December 4th, 2007 at 10:18 pm

    Why doesn’t it work on the iPod Touch? (I don’t have one, this is a serious question.)

  12. dc

    December 4th, 2007 at 10:25 pm

    Switching between products is really fast even on edge.

    I hope they make gtalk work on iPhone.

  13. Parul Bindra

    December 4th, 2007 at 10:37 pm

    This feels a whole bunch more web 2.0 (to me, anyways) and requires
    less back and forth page action. Anyways, great work so far on google reader and google reader mobile!

    But yeah but losing the unread subscriptions view kills the app’s usability for most of the users.

    Parul
    http://www.bhopu.com

  14. Rajeev

    December 4th, 2007 at 11:55 pm

    Customising product for product , unheard of.

    http://tekno-world.blogspot.com

  15. Spuds

    December 5th, 2007 at 12:22 am

    Looks very nice. Google and the iPhone make a great team.

  16. jon bradford

    December 5th, 2007 at 1:28 am

    Very cool.

    Is there any substance in the fact that the Google Phone browser is based upon the same platform that iPhone Safari uses.

    So all the effort getting the iPhone interface working will ultimately be rolled out on the Android platform.

  17. David Hughes

    December 5th, 2007 at 1:35 am

    Sadly it insists on redirecting me to google.co.uk which doesn’t have this interface!

    Grrr mutter

  18. David Hughes

    December 5th, 2007 at 1:40 am

    Can anybody find a way of accessing this from a UK iPhone?

  19. Jamie

    December 5th, 2007 at 1:53 am

    if you are in the UK, try google.com/m. It works for me

  20. Jamie

    December 5th, 2007 at 1:54 am

    holy jesus its lightning fast. instantaneous between google apps.

  21. Jon Silk

    December 5th, 2007 at 1:58 am

    Can’t see this (in the UK). Must. Try. Harder. Aaargh…

  22. titan

    December 5th, 2007 at 2:40 am

    Is it 1998? Are we all moving back into the world of sending different sites to different user agents… ‘oooh this one’s special and only the iphone can use it…’
    They could have done this the clever way and rolled out to all mobiles if they’d built with the principles of progressive enhancement.
    Why is, when we’ve come so far on the desktop world, we now have to go through it all again with mobile…

  23. David Hughes

    December 5th, 2007 at 2:53 am

    @Jamie Thanks that worked. Odd though… if I chose teh mobile interface from google.com I still got routed to the UK version.

    All is well… once more the internet has come to the rescue :-)

  24. micfo.com

    December 5th, 2007 at 3:55 am

    It does not look glossy and attractive.

  25. iPhoneHomeController

    December 5th, 2007 at 4:28 am

    This is great. Very nicely done Google! It is fast. Joe Hewitt’s interface is not that quick, at least from my own experiments with it.

  26. Vinod

    December 5th, 2007 at 6:04 am

    WoW!.. I tried with google.com/m now and it works great. Even on an EDGE network, the first load takes about 20 seconds but from then switching between any google service is real snappy.

  27. Jason

    December 5th, 2007 at 6:15 am

    @micfo.com

    That’s because no one cares about “glossy and attractive” when you are looking for fast and efficient searching on a mobile phone. Besides, when has Google EVER been “glossy and attractive”. Performance over style.

  28. Rob

    December 5th, 2007 at 6:36 am

    it would be great if they had a site like this for AdSense…

  29. Emmanuel Paraskakis

    December 5th, 2007 at 6:40 am

    Brian,

    iGoogle still works fine for me, even after logging in to the new /m interface. I’ve got them both Bookmarked and am able to visit both with no problems.
    My iGoogle homepage is still there…

  30. Jerome Paradis

    December 5th, 2007 at 6:44 am

    Google continue to make the same mistakes: still not detecting the iPod Touch.

    Relying on browser detection sometime makes you smart, but it also makes you dumb when it does’t work. I’m sick of engineers trying to be more bright than their users.

    Why not offer alternate URLs that work from any browser? Like Facebook does, for example…

  31. Lode

    December 5th, 2007 at 6:47 am

    Impressively fast and well executed.

    If it insists on giving you either the classic mobile interface or your local version, go to http://google.com/ncr - this worked for me at least.

    For those who don’t know it, the Yahoo mobile interface is impressive as well by the way.

  32. Bill

    December 5th, 2007 at 6:52 am

    A good clean first pass. The Google site fits in with all those .mobi sites popping up on small screens. We’ll eventually see anything and everything coming to mobile.

    Before they start to add all the bells and whistles I hope that they remember that most people prefer to have a mobile site load FAST and have easy to read chunks of information. Save the flashy stuff and bloated designs for the desktop.

  33. titan

    December 5th, 2007 at 7:05 am

    .Mobi - another poor idea. Here’s a whacky idea - what about one web site that accessible across devices, on one domain, that (through the magic of progressive enhancement) exploits the best features of each device (mobile, PC, tv etc etc).
    I just don’t understand the approach that on the iphone (and maybe the touch if they’ve thought about the different user agent string) you have to visit site domain/x.com, whilst at home on your PC it’s site domain/y, and on your Archos 605 its site domain/z.
    I like the iui stuff, i do - but please consider the bigger picture here…
    end of rant…

  34. Cooper Lang

    December 5th, 2007 at 7:57 am

    Apparently google has not rolled this one out for the Canadian market yet. When accessing Google from my iPhone here in Canada it redirects me to the mobile .ca version of the site.

    I guess it is just one more issue we Canadians will have to work around until Rogers gets off their asses =)

  35. VW

    December 5th, 2007 at 7:58 am

    looks great for use. sucks for small web masters because they have to create a whole other site for mobile users.

  36. Benglued

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:05 am

    looks great in iphone

  37. Mike Tim

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:15 am

    How about google gears for mobile?

  38. EJ

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    Doesn’t most of this functionality seem redundant with (and inferior to) the iPhone’s native apps? Google search from the taskbar is quicker, I abandoned Google Calendars for the iPhone’s lovely native calendar app a while ago, Gmail doesn’t alert you like the native Mail app (although it has the advantage of allowing you to multi-select!), the Picasa photo viewer pales in comparison to the iPhone viewer…

    If anything, this is an interesting reminder to me that the iPhone has already either significantly augmented or replaced a lot of web apps that I couldn’t live without a few months ago.

  39. Maria P.

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:22 am

    This is convenient and I use it but I don’t like that the only interface I can have with Google Calendar is the one day format.

  40. Rocky

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:24 am

    @7/step and @30 jerome

    Works fine on my iPod Touch. I’m in the U.S.

  41. James C

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:25 am

    Wow!

    http://www.ipdonkey.com

  42. Jon Doerr

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:37 am

    For those *without* an iPhone, check it out:

    who want to see what it looks

  43. Jon Doerr

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:38 am

    Oops - try that again:

    For those *without* an iPhone, check it out:

    1. You’ll need Firefox
    2. Install the User Agent Switcher at http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/
    3. Add the iPhone user agent:
    Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A109a Safari/419.3
    4. Switch over and visit http://www.google.com

  44. Matthew

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:45 am

    Why are maps still not included? I want Mymaps on my iphone!

  45. TonyW

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:46 am

    Also works fine for me this morning on my iPod Touch.

  46. techmine

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:52 am

    It does not show results for the web search. Images, local and news is fine but no web results.
    Anybody else face the issue?

  47. Steve Ballmer

    December 5th, 2007 at 8:55 am

    Looks like WinMobile MSNSearch!

    grrrrr!

  48. Angelina Mina

    December 5th, 2007 at 9:35 am

    wow, thats really coool. I just love using google apps

    Angelina

  49. Mehrzad

    December 5th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    WOW!
    IT MAKES ME CRAZY!
    ;)

  50. John

    December 5th, 2007 at 9:55 am

    Sorry, this is made of fail. I don’t live in one of those big cities that’s blanketed with free wifi, so I’m on Edge 95% of the time. Over Edge, this is dog slow.

    I tried it several times, and it took 20-30 seconds to load every time. The plain old mobile interface took a second or two at most to load. Why in the world would I want to have to wait all that extra time every time I want to do a quick Google search?

    No such thing as a “quick Google search” on the iPhone any more, I guess. Is there any way to get to the vanilla mobile version on an iPhone now? Big step backward.

  51. Charbax

    December 5th, 2007 at 10:18 am

    Is there any way to access this version of Google from a specific URL a bit like http://www.google.com/m and http://www.google.com/m/classic?hl=en so that it could be used on other mobile phones?

  52. Google - privacy please

    December 5th, 2007 at 10:20 am

    No thanks Google! Just stay away from my pocket.

    The last thing I want you to do is follow me on my mobile phone.

  53. Adam

    December 5th, 2007 at 10:30 am

    Pretty Cool, anyway of gettin this on my Nokia N95?

  54. Brett

    December 5th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

    Very nice. If you’re looking specifically for iPhone compatible apps or sites, you can search via Clever Hippo iPhone interface.

  55. Chris Thomson

    December 5th, 2007 at 12:35 pm

    Looks really nice. I tried it in Safari 3 (with my user-agent set as Mobile Safari), and I found it weird that to login to your Google account (for any of the services), it says “sign in to your account on google.com” and shows a box like this:

    Username: ____________
    @google.com
    Password: ____________

    Why does it think my username is @google.com? Should it at least say @gmail.com? Really, it should say @gmail.com for the gmail login, and no @ for the other services…

    Hmmmm
    (just in case it gets fixed, and you want to see it, I screenshoted it, here.)

  56. Noah Kronemeyer

    December 5th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

    Here’s a bug:

    Click MORE. Click SEARCH. Rinse. Wash. Repeat. See how many “menu bars” you can get to fill up your screen! I can fit 11 without scrolling!

  57. Brad Baldwin

    December 5th, 2007 at 1:49 pm

    Nice clean design. But the iPhone is so much more than a dumb terminal. I hope that Google and others invest efforts in the iPhone SDK to make Gmail, Calendar, and other apps with local computing, communication, and storage options for their services.

  58. Frank Daley

    December 5th, 2007 at 2:30 pm

    I second Adam’s comment - would love to see this on my Nokia N95

  59. jbelkin

    December 5th, 2007 at 5:02 pm

    Not bad - now if they can only get Google Maps to load and work correctly … Online spreadsheet EDITGRID has an iphone version now also.

  60. Kevin Crawford

    December 5th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    okay for iphone enthusiasts.

  61. Kikerberg

    December 6th, 2007 at 1:59 am

    The iPhone is for dumbass Maczealots and fashion lemmings.

  62. MB

    December 6th, 2007 at 6:12 am

    another example that Google just plain gets it - end users with with a good experience will surf surf and surf, and click on adwords…. great example of where this handset experience needs to go. I just got the Blackjack II from ATT and it is just the same old s..t compared to the iphone and google. I await just a better browser on such a fast 3G phone. Any suggestions?

  63. TheMacThinker

    December 6th, 2007 at 6:26 am

    I am just concerned about google using its opensource freedom to copy what is unique to the iPhone. But I think that it will take another good year to anyone else to come close to the iPhone that Apple has mastered.

    http://www.iPhoneUnlocked.MostOfMymac.com

  64. MB

    December 6th, 2007 at 6:35 am

    I understand, but at the end of the day, dont you believe that the end user will choose the best option for a good experience? Apple has always insisted on using open source software to create a superb user experience, which ends up being a walled garden in terms of personalisation and developer opportunity…. Google is truly open, and allow the developer community to push it as far as possible. If apple catches on to this, then we will have a great head to head with apple and google… look at the android demo, this is really good stuff.

  65. Koka Sexton

    December 6th, 2007 at 8:39 am

    This is really just a ‘nice to have’. The calendar needs to be worked on since the formatting is off. Google Reader is nice but why would you need to see gmail since it should be routed directly to your phone anyway?

  66. Trevor Doerksen

    December 6th, 2007 at 8:50 am

    doesn’t work for me. maybe like others in Canada.

  67. Chris

    December 6th, 2007 at 2:29 pm

    You need to be using an iPhone which sets the useragent as Safari for iPhone. Otherwise you will see the old mobile page. More details here

    http://www.appsafari.com/news/218/google-mobile/

  68. MarkA

    December 6th, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    Great. Dual scrollbars on a mobile screen - just what we all need more of.

    (see reader and calendar screenshots)

    Titan: have you tried using mowser for auto-optimization based on phone?

  69. Ipod Touch Blogger

    December 9th, 2007 at 12:54 am

    I wrote similar post about it, also I write tips and tricks about IPT :) ….let me know what you think about it.

  70. yulinova

    December 28th, 2007 at 3:38 am

    it’s an amazing phone!!we can access the site wherever we go, whenever we need information.Thanks geogle….finally geogle are stay in my pocket!

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