Users can start the app and logto their Google accounts, and either type or speak to find what they’re looking for just like with any other query. 

"Here’s a quick example: you’ve just received an email from a friend who’s coming with you on a camping trip this weekend and he’s reminded you that you should take a look at the checklist to see what you need to bring along," says Google software engineer Luis Sigal. "It’s been a while since you created the list, but you can just say ‘checklist’ to Google Mobile App and find it in your Google Docs in a couple of clicks."

"Google takes information security very seriously, so all your Gmail and Google Docs searches are sent over a secure https connection," adds Sigal. "Your password is never permanently stored on your phone, and your account details are encrypted during transmission."

There is more info about the app available in this help center.

The badge will appear right on the home screen.

"We’ve also added spiffy features to get you information faster — when looking for flight info, weather, stock quotes or currency conversion you’ll see answers before you even hit ‘Search’," says Google engineering manager David Singleton.

Google launched an updated version of Google Mobile for the iPhone in December, with a redesigned search results display that showed more results at once. It also opens web pages from the results within the app, a change from the previous version. It also came with Voice Search and My Location.

Today’s release builds on these features integrating more of the overall Google experience with the device. This could prove to be key once Google reveals its plans for the rumored "Google Me".

The app is available in the App Store.

"For those less utilitarian and more flamboyant, we’ve exposed our visual tweaks settings called ‘Bells and Whistles’ – some of our users had discovered this already in previous versions," says Google software engineer Alastair Tse. "You can style your Google Mobile App in any shade: red, taupe, or even heliotrope. If you’re on a faster iPhone, like the iPhone 3GS, you may want to try the live waveform setting which turns on, as the name suggests, a moving waveform when you search by voice."

"On the subject of searching by voice, you can now choose your spoken language or accent," adds Tse. "For example, if you’re Australian but live in London, you can improve the recognition accuracy by selecting Australian in the Voice Search settings. And now both Mandarin and Japanese are supported languages as well." 

The app also includes "My Location," which lets users avoid typing their current location when searching for nearby businesses, Google Suggest, which shows suggested queries as the user types, and search history.

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Books on this version have been optimized to be read on small screens, which is not the easiest thing in the world to do. A post by the Google Book Search Mobile Team explains the process a bit:

There’s an interesting backstory about the work involved to prepare so many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you’ll notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone’s small screen.

Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short).

Unfortunately, this system is not entirely perfect, and plenty of mistakes are bound to turn up. Things like smudges, torn pages, or even obscure fonts can throw up the OCR. The team provides this example from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground:

The text the OCR came away with was:

"lV~e.il!" .ÍAoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tlas ~tk¿* , I s&O.IL .éfiiíjz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1¿*y ¿i^n. sta¿rs ! Jfo» ura.ve …

Obviously that is going to be a problem to readers. However, when readers come across issues like this, they can simply tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text, so hopefully it won’t be too big a hassle. If these errors occur frequently though, readers are likely to give up and just find something else to read, or find the content elsewhere. All of that said, iPhone and Android users should be happy to have a free library of literature at their finger tips.

Now however, Google has decided that the iPhone users shouldn’t get any special treatment, and should share the same mobile iGoogle experience that those with other kinds of phones do. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a thread in the Google Web Search Forum, where users have been venting their frustration for days.

At one point a Google representative responded, "We’ve decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We’ve found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones — we want to ensure you’ll all see the same version. Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren’t compatible with most mobile browsers." He then provided a help center link and set users off even more.

This is not the first time Google has received criticism for how it has handled iGoogle. Back in October, it rolled out a new design without warning, and upset the applecart. While not everyone hated it, it seemed that most were incredibly peeved. Why would this be any different?

In the future, if Google wishes to make changes with iGoogle that affect everybody who uses it, perhaps it would be best to communicate the changes to users beforehand, or better yet, allow an opt-in feature for said changes. Otherwise, people are going to continue to raise hell. But on the other hand, it’s their product and they can do whatever they want.

Previously, Google would have only recognized the words entered in these fields as parts of an address. For example, it would have looked for "Starbucks" as a town or street name perhaps, rather than recognizing it as a business.

"Google Maps for mobile now recognizes when your end or start point is a business and not an address. Try setting "starbucks" or "mcdonald’s" as an end point when getting directions, and you’ll quickly see what we mean," says Software Engineer, Constantinos Michael on the blog.

This new change was made right on Google’s servers, so users who already have Google Maps for Mobile won’t have to download anything extra.

"From this we’ll be able to see more clearly what’s important to you and we’ll take it into consideration as we move forward with developing our products," says a post from the Product Ideas Team. "The Product Ideas team will pop in from time to time to see what you have to say, and we’ll be offering periodic updates on what we see and what ideas make it into your favorite products in our Product Ideas blog."

Some of the top ideas at the time of this writing include:

- Cache map data for Google Maps for a small area around a person’s current location

– Manage Google Calendar on Google Mobile

– A "Google Product Ideas" page for all Google services, and

– An application that speaks the driving directions in Google maps

Google acknowledges that they pay attention to ideas left in comments on their blog posts and in forums, but the product ideas page should nevertheless provide a good way for them to see which ones are really in demand, and could potentially better serve to get them to come to fruition.

They’ve got a page up that provides a place where you can learn a new way to use Google Mobile each day. Tips range from traffic and transit and tracking Santa to numeric search and comparison shopping, with a lot more in between. It has provided not only encouragement on Google’s part for people to use their product, but it has provided usability tips to people who already use it anyway.

Google has also been offering a number of video tips for Google Mobile, generally aimed at holiday themes. In fact, they set up an entire YouTube channel, which I discussed and highlighted some videos from here.

Today, Google has shared a few more such video tips to close out the holiday season. The first one shows how to do some last-minute shopping using Google Docs and Google Maps for mobile.

The second one shows how to keep in touch with far-off relatives with a cameraphone, Picasa Webalbums, and a WiFi-enabled picture frame.

And the third one shows you how to search for recipes on your phone, use mobile YouTube, and search for local times to wish your far-off friends a Happy New Year.

And while we’re looking at Holiday videos, I might as well share our own here too.

Happy Holidays from WebProNews!

Google Mobile has a whole YouTube channel dedicated to tips, and has given it a makeover for the holidays providing tips that could be helpful specifically during the holiday season. They are also encouraging others to submit their own videos of Google Mobile tips and will share their favorite ones.

Some of their own useful tips include things like:

And so forth. You can see a nice playlist of them here.

Google is also of course counting down to 2009 with more Google Mobile tips as previously discussed. In fact, they are doing that with a number of their products.

While we still await the official announcement, the Boy Genius Report has scored some screenshots of the phone, providing a good look into the phone itself as well as the operating system. "The desktop shot looks roughly similar to the Android desktop shots that we’ve seen from the beginning, with a collection of customizable widgets that display a variety of at-a-glance info and access to commonly used applications," writes Joshua Karp at the site. "The presence of a MyFaves icon ensures compatibility with T-Mobile’s unlimited calling service."

The real question is just how competitive the market is going to get as a result of Google being involved. "While search won’t necessarily play the identical role in mobile it does online, it will still be a prominent part of the mobile Internet experience," says Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land. "You can bet Google is banking on that." Sterling also has an in depth look at said market, taking into account data from Nielsen as well as Android Co-founder Andy Rubin’s recent "future of mobile" post on the Google Blog.

Either way, the G1 should be a strong weapon for T-Mobile, provided it doesn’t face any iPhone 3G-like issues. Hopefully they can at least avoid the false advertising controversy. For all the G1 info you want, the T-Mobile press conference starts at 10:30 AM (with an on-demand version being made available just after).