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.
Amazon also has abeta web only for iPhone.
(sent from my iPhone)
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.
Not only does Google know all your surfing habits, they will soon know who, what, and where you call. Kinda scary.
This is pretty sweet. Nice integration of all the G services. On WI-FI it’s quick and loads fast. Nice job G.
The interface is really alarmingly fast!
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.
/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!
This will be an additional reach point for Google . More users and more ads !!
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?
Mine always reverts to google.co.in and this new interface is not available yet on iPhone.
Why doesn’t it work on the iPod Touch? (I don’t have one, this is a serious question.)
Switching between products is really fast even on edge.
I hope they make gtalk work on iPhone.
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
Customising product for product , unheard of.
http://tekno-wo...ld.blogspot.com
Looks very nice. Google and the iPhone make a great team.
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.
Sadly it insists on redirecting me to google.co.uk which doesn’t have this interface!
Grrr mutter
Can anybody find a way of accessing this from a UK iPhone?
if you are in the UK, try google.com/m. It works for me
holy jesus its lightning fast. instantaneous between google apps.
Can’t see this (in the UK). Must. Try. Harder. Aaargh…
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…
@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
It does not look glossy and attractive.
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.
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.
@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.
it would be great if they had a site like this for AdSense…
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…
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…
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.
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.
.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…
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 =)
looks great for use. sucks for small web masters because they have to create a whole other site for mobile users.
looks great in iphone
How about google gears for mobile?
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.
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.
@7/step and @30 jerome
Works fine on my iPod Touch. I’m in the U.S.
Wow!
http://www.ipdonkey.com
For those *without* an iPhone, check it out:
who want to see what it looks
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://chrisped...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
Why are maps still not included? I want Mymaps on my iphone!
Also works fine for me this morning on my iPod Touch.
It does not show results for the web search. Images, local and news is fine but no web results.
Anybody else face the issue?
Looks like WinMobile MSNSearch!
grrrrr!
wow, thats really coool. I just love using google apps
Angelina
WOW!
IT MAKES ME CRAZY!
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.