Give Us One Minute

Readers know that we love Google apps such as Gmail, Calendar and most recently Notebook. Readers also know that we love our iPhone. So imagine our thrill when we find that Google has modified some of their most popular apps to work even better with the iPhone. There must be a lot of iPhone fans at Google HQ or are they going to partner with Apple for the much rumored GooglePhone…hmmm. But we digress.

Recently while using our iPhone to browse to the mobile Google apps, we’ve noticed some slight changes to a couple of our most used apps. These changes have made the mobile Google experience even better using the iPhone. Below are a couple of stylized shots to show you what we mean (and these ain’t great shots folks…if you know how get good screen shots from the iPhone, could you send us the info?) and some descriptions of the latest changes.

Gmail
First off here’s Google Gmail on the iPhone (we told you they were sad images!):

Why it’s worth a minute:

• Every other message on the inbox display has alternate highlighting making it easier to read the listing.
• You can now make multiple selections with the tap of your finger to delete, archive, move, mark or star! Very nice since previously this was a single message at a time affair.
• There’s a nice large compose button at the upper-right hand corner. Previously this was a very small text link that we often missed.
• A search box has been added at the bottom of each page. Very handy!
• The composing a message page has nice new large buttons. Push away folks!

What would make it worth a few more minutes:

• Integration with our iPhone contacts (Is this even possible? We don’t know cuz we ain’t programmers nor iPhone Developers).
• A larger message input box. At the moment is only goes across half the page.
• Making our online Gmail account our default e-mail (another “is this even possible” wish).

One last thing before we move on to Google Calendar. Even though we hate the AT&T Edge network, we still prefer using the web browser version of Gmail over the iPhone Mail client. Why? Because the iPhone Mail client uses POP access and we have to review duplicate messages once we return to Gmail using a regular browser. Now when we visit Gmail using Safari on the iPhone, it’s sorta, kinda like we have IMAP. Every thing’s synced and no more reading or dealing with duplicate messages.

Calendar
Google has also shown Calendar some love during the past few days with a couple of cosmetic changes we are digging. Here’s the horrible shot. Of course we mean of the iPhone screen, not the guy holding it. The names and dates have been scrubbed out to protect the innocent.

Why it’s worth a minute:

• New highlighted colors (makes us all warm and fuzzy inside like a nice spot of tea).
• Calendar color codes are now displayed when viewing multiple calendars.
• All day events color coding are just a bit wider making them stand out from regular day-to-day events.
• Large Next and Previous buttons at the bottom of each page allow us to quickly move through two-days worth of events at a time.
• Click an event, get the details (including a map if you have entered an address)

What would make it worth a few more minutes:

• Come on Google. I mean really. Sure we can add an event pretty quickly using some basic grammatical syntax, but could you please give us the ability to edit an event.
• While we’re at it, how about the ability to just delete an event. We can’t tell you how many times we have added an event incorrectly and the had to wait to get to a real web-browser (or navigate our iPhone to the none mobile version of the page…very painful) to make the changes.
• Month and weekly views. Come on guys, that’s standard calendar stuff. Isn’t it?

So there you have it. A list of what Google is doing to allow us to be even more productive using our iPhone. Now if we could just get them “iPhoneize” (did we coin that phrase first?) Google Notebook (see image below for that painful, non working experience!) we could finally manage our “Getting Things Done” lists on the go!

So what do you think about these changes and our thoughts? Post your comments and let the discussion begin.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: google, calendar, gmail, apps, apple, iphone