Google for the iPhone

Even as Apple releases its SDK for third-party iPhone application development, the Web-based apps keep getting better. Google’s new entryway for the mobile Safari browser is a case in point. Available at m.google.com, the browser brings together most of the major Google services, reformatted beautifully for the iPhone.

Everything Google, but on the iPhone

Along the top of Google’s new front page runs a line of buttons for easy access to Gmail, Calendar, Reader (RSS feeds), and More, which drops you into other tools such as Google Docs, Picasa photo sharing, online notetaking in Notebook, and even direct-dial access to Google’s Goog-411 phone search service. Blogger, Google News, and an SMS messaging tool are also here. Unfortunately, Gmail chat doesn’t work.

The main page uses Ajax programming, so you can move across the main services—even Web, Image, and News Search options—without reloading.

In fact, one of the striking features of Google for iPhone is the speed of the application at every turn. Because Google preloads some elements, you can move from search to mail to calendar to feeds instantly, further accelerating the experience.

Searching with Google on the iPhone

The search box has a predictive engine that offers accurate suggestions for keywords once you start typing; these keywords also work as shortcuts. Type ”LED” and a drop-down suggestion menu offers ”Led Zeppelin” or ”Ledo Pizza,” which you can highlight and use instead of typing the full word. Search results pop up very quickly, and they’re the same universal results as a standard Google search.

The general search results include video and image hits, and the YouTube links activate the embedded YouTube player on the iPhone deck. Local results are nicely formatted with direct-dial links that call business listings.

We were disappointed by the lack of mapping in the local results, but this feature has since been added, tying local search results directly to the superb Google Maps that are already part of the iPhone operating system.

Applications Aplenty

All the apps performed extremely well. Gmail includes contacts from your Web account. You can get your feed of headers and first lines of message text here in much the same way as you get your iPhone e-mail, but Gmail handles attachments better. It renders everything from Excel spreadsheets and Word docs to PowerPoints and PDFs very effectively in browser windows. Likewise, the Reader application dances across your feeds to deliver a few lines of lead text for each item, followed by another page with extended text, before linking you to the original Web page. The Google Docs app doesn’t let you edit the files you keep online, but you can review them. We would have liked to see file forwarding, however.

The Verdict on Google for the iPhone

Google’s iPhone app is far and away the best mobile portal we’ve seen. Yahoo Go is more cluttered, and AOL’s and MSN’s mobile WAP pages are less functional. Google makes superb use of the iPhone interface, putting it right up there with the Digg and Facebook executions as one of the best destinations for your iPhone’s browser.