Google is bringing offline apps to mobile phones - and this has nothing to do with Android.
Google Gears, which allows developers to create apps that run on Firefox and Internet Explorer when offline, is supposed to launch later today under the name Google Gears for mobile. (Information for developers is already available here). It will support only Pocket IE running on Windows Mobile devices to start (Windows Mobile 5 and 6), but will expand to other mobile browsers eventually. (Presumably, that includes Safari on the iPhone and Opera Mobile).
At launch, several partners, including Zoho and Buxfer, will introduce mobile apps that can run on Pocket IE even when not connected to the network. Zoho Writer (which first went offline with Google Gears in August) will now be available for Windows Mobile 6, and it will have an offline capability as well thanks to Google Gears. (Here is a video demo). The offline mobile version is a read-only version. Zoho Writer already has a mobile online version for the iPhone, and was the first word processor to go offline with the desktop version of Google Gears.
Google itself has yet to offer a Google Gears version of Google Docs. But we understand that it’s coming soon, as are offline desktop versions of Gmail and Google Calendar.
This announcement also means that it’s game time for Adobe and Microsoft. They either need to come out with mobile versions of AIR and Silverlight or risk being left in the dust. Update: That was fast. Silverlight countermoves with a mobile version for Nokia phones.
Update: Google Mobile post here, Google Gears API post here. And here’s a video:
Would be nice if they worked on this for Opera Mobile.
… maybe that would encourage things to be made for desktop Opera.
Someday…
Google is taking over once again. It’s just a matter of time. Mobile application and programs are the wave of the future!
Kelsey
http://www.helpuu.com - The google-powered search engine that helps.
The mobile ecosystem is getting better day by days..guess its a matter of time and we will start seeing killer apps on mobile too
I didn’t say they could do that!
where is the video?
Too bad it doesn’t support Safari/WebKit/iPhone, even though the iPhone has a bigger browser marketshare than Windows Mobile:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....ws-mobile/
awesome!
MEMO:
Dear Microsoft,
You’d better hurry and buy Zoho. These guys are for real! If Zoho had a PR machine like Salesforce it would be scary. Just this evening I was playing around with some of their other offerings. It’s very robust and feature rich.
I guess…
Except…
Its a cell. phone….
So…I mean…off line mode for a cell phone…
Great…Super…and by “Great” and “Super” I mean “not that big a deal”…
Seriously, there are certainly uses for this sort of thing but they’re few and far between. If anything most Cell. phones don’t have the memory available to do much with this kind of functionality.
Cell. Phones are about being connected and accessing connected data. Offline mode is something that Adobe and Microsoft should consider but I’d hardly call it a top priority. It certainly isn’t a deal breaker.
@Tom,
“Cell. Phones are about being connected”. Yes, they should be. But they are not. You’d be surprised about some areas in the SF Bay Area, supposedly the heart of all Tech with very poor coverage. So until we get full full connectivity, we need full access: online or offline.
Me and my friends/coworkers use Google Docs. Who uses Zoho? I know nobody that does??
@Zoli - I see what you’re saying but I guess my question would be “Don’t you already have all the stuff you need offline?”
I think my point was more that this really doesn’t have any immediate practical application. Most people already have Calendars that sync with their Cell. and anyone with a Windows Smartphone who needs to carry around Word or Excel docs will already be doing that. What you need the cell. phone for is the connected stuff.
To me, this is a gimmick feature. Not real useful but it will get some press attention and make Google look like their leaders in this area (when, from what I’ve seen, Adobe AIR is actually much further along). Their aim is to trick people and, as the first few comments in this thread show, it worked.
But really, if they were serious about this wouldn’t they have Google Docs, Calendar, etc… ready from the start? They certainly wouldn’t be pushing a competitor. The reason Zoho is front and center is because they are a small company and being part of any Google press release is a coup for them. So Google can make this look real without much development time by throwing Zoho a bone in exchange for them whipping up what is essentially a demo app.
Don’t get me wrong, its nice PR theatre, I just don’t think it amounts to much.
> This announcement also means that it’s game time for Adobe and Microsoft. They either need to come out with mobile versions of AIR and Silverlight or risk being left in the dust.
You should have read
“Nokia to bring Microsoft Silverlight powered experiences to millions of mobile users”, http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1197788 ,
before you wrote the paragraph quoted above.
Are you the PR department of Google?
It’s telling that Scoble who is in the middle of his FastCompany.TV launch has time to include this in his blog, while 9 person blog TechCrunch is only “breaking” news it gets served on a silver platter.
I strongly feel here, Google as taking over MS and Adobe…. only time will tell though.
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Thanks for the spam-tastic alert Armand!
I’ll be sure to never visit that site, ever!
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how are they going to push ads offline? what is the business model behind this?
@Hustle Strategy, they don’t need to push ads offline. If they can make web applications a more viable replacement for desktop/mobile apps then they get more people using things like Google Docs and the ads are shown when they’re connected. It increases the number of users.
Hmm Android to Gears, there isn’t really much to link the two names other than an android might contain some gears.
Android Online and Mobile would have made more sense, but would be a blatant copy of Silverlight!
My buddy at Verizon Wireless tells me that Google has been buying up the old analog wireless towers. He says they will be obsolete in the mid future…given this, I wonder what Google is up to?
This doesnt make any sense. Typing on a mobile device is hard enough that one would not think of using a browser based interface to edit documents. For viewing documents, its far easier to just view attachments in email — blackberry, iphone, windows mobile all allow for this for a while now.
Offline version of gmail, or calendar? You mean like the one blackberries etc have, but much less usable because you have to map a browser UI experience to a mobile device?
Ironically, Google Gears in nutshell is what had been cut from Mozilla to make it Firefox and sent unnecessary part into castaway Thunderbird. But Google has it’s own logic…
@Tech Bytes: A video interview by Dion Almaer with the Google Gears for mobile crew is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8P0PbgS52c
@Alex: Zoho is a great company and they’ve been great to work with.
@Tom: I use my cell phone for much more than just calls now. Its become my address book, my central repository for information and searching, and more. Something like Google Gears for mobile makes much more sense with the newer category of internet-connected cell phones (i.e. what folks used to call smart phones). I disagree that offline access isn’t important for that world — in fact, it makes even more sense than for desktop machines which have more reliable internet access. Plus, cellular networks have extremely high latency, making Gears attractive for these platforms; see a blog post on this at http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/.....plane.html
In addition, Google Gears for mobile is about much more than offline. You can use features like worker pools, the embedded database, and more to create much more feature full, reliable web applications that can deal with latency, crashes, etc. that have nothing to do with offline. Its more about having the information you want instantaneously, like a corporate calendar of all your contacts in the embedded database, using the full-text search capabilities of SQLite inside of Google Gears for mobile.
@Hustle Strategy: The business model behind Gears in general is to help the web continue to be a place where innovation can happen on the edges. It’s an enabling technology that helps to spur Google’s other businesses (and other projects and startup companies); think of it like investment in the interstate highway system by FedEx so they can get their packages to clients much faster.
@Vijay: I agree that typing on Windows Mobile devices can be tedious. Zoho Writer is read-only offline access; this makes it easy to read and access your documents offline without having to attach every one of them to an email to read in Windows Mobile’s email client. The same is true for Buxfer, where you wouldn’t want to be emailing your personal financial information to yourself just to view at regular intervals. Offline read-only information makes alot of sense on Windows Mobile devices because you don’t get the issues with the keyboard.
@Zoli Erodos: I agree; I live in San Francisco and can’t get cell phone coverage in much of my house! Until the day that the entire world is deeply blanked with reliable cell phone coverage offline access on mobile devices makes sense (and it will take much longer than you expect for full true coverage to appear).
@Tim: I work for Google, and use both Google Docs and Zoho for different purposes. They are both strong web-based word processors.
Best,
Brad Neuberg
Google Gears
http://codinginparadise.org
It will be fun to see where this goes over time. Zoho is interesting, but what I really want to do is to use my phone to order and pay for a beer at the local bar - while I am still on my way there. Give me the ability to easily do that on a phone with more than single-digit market share and then you will have my interest.
IMHO there are a lot of short-sighted opinions here about what people will and wont do with their phones. In my experience people *expect* to be able to do exactly the same things on their pocket internet devices as they do on the desktop, and get annoyed when only offered “second class”/cut-down service (c.f. WAP).
Secondly, mobile access to the internet is currently the fastest growing area. And no, that doesn’t equal always-connected. Many developing countries are skipping wired and heading straight for mobile comms.
Overall: This is fantastic news!
But I do find it amusing that Google have launched this with Zoho instead of their own Docs, for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile with Pocket Internet Explorer, while Microsoft in turn have targeted Nokia devices with their offering instead of their own Windows Mobile OS… it’s a mixed up world.
But come on Google… let’s have this for a real mobile browser! I thought that the only use for PocketIE was downloading the Opera Mobile CAB file? Nobody actually tries to use it as a web browser do they?
Hola soy amar y este año en enero he visto un fantasma a mi trabajo.
se parecia a una persona semitransparente y muy animado de vida igual o mejor que si estuviera vivo. Ne me asusto para nada porque no era agresivo para nada ni se dirigia hacia mi de hecho hacia ninguna persona iba o sea el fantasma era muy pacifico, me gusto mucho verlo, es una rxperiencia tan fantastica que volveria a repitir lo.
Amar. de Barcelona
i really dont like