The Google Mobile iPhone and iPod Touch application review

One of the first applications to be delivered to the iPhone and the iPod Touch platforms was the Google Mobile App. This application, in our opinion is very under estimated as it delivers an amazing array of not only web Google searches, but also your contacts.

When we first received the Google mobile app, we honestly just thought of it as almost a Google application to just get their icon on your home screen. But after we started using the application, it has become on of the most useful research tools available. On the iPhone, Google has included voice recognition so you can simple ask it search queries, such as "where is closest pizza" and not only have you not had to type the search, but the results show pizza locations, directions to each and all the relevant phone numbers.

The speech recognition technology we believe is provided by PocketSphinx and we were very impressed with the accuracy, ironically in longer queries results were much better as it did struggle on names. We believe this may be due to way the speech recognition is pushed through the "did you mean..." system from regular web based searches before your results are displayed

You can ask Google mobile to only search certain categories by pressing the drop down magnification glass icon. You have iPhone and Web, Maps, Images, News, Shopping and Wikipedia searches right from the first page. Maps, Shopping and iPhone and web use location aware, so you can narrow your searches to location.

There are 3 sections, the first is the search options, which we have talked about, but the other two are apps and a setting panel. The Apps page is a little bit of a letdown as it is basically just a launcher of mobile safari Google apps. If you choose Gmail, the Google mobile application closes and safari opens gmail.com.

We wish that Google used in the cocoa embedded safari web browse within the Google mobile app, as opposed to exiting and launching. It would have kept things contained and streamlined.

Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Talk, Tasks, Reader, GOOG-411, News, Book Reader, Notebook, Photos from Picasso, orkut, Translate, Maps, YouTube and Google Earth are listed under the apps section, with all of them simply linking to either the correct website service or application on your device.

If you have a Premier Edition domain registered with Google, the Google mobile app will log directly into your Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Talk services.

Overall this application is amazing, and very use full, but its downfall is actually the marketing. Google mobile app is a Ferrari dressed as a yogo, and you really don't realize the power of the application until you have really dug in and realized just what it can do.