Google Fast Flip Mobile for iPhone and Android

Launched today from Google labs, Fast Flip (fastflip.googlelabs.com) is being billed by Google as a faster way to read news. It’s basically a news search engine like Google News.  But instead of text summaries, Fast Flip returns results in the form of high-resolution screen shots of the first page of online news articles matching your query. You can read  at least part of the story using the image and click through to the source site to read it all. The … Continue reading

Mobilize 09 – Moto and INQ With Android, Oh Boy!

I attended yesterday’s Mobilize conference in San Fransisco and did a quick post about Motorola’s big announcement,  the Cliq with MOTOBLUR.  I wanted to follow up with a little bit more about the conference and my analysis about why I think Android is significant for mobile web browsing and mobile web services. Mobilize was very well done.  Kudos to Om and his staff and sponsors for sweating the details and making Mobilize a good experience for everyone.  Things like good … Continue reading

Motorola’s First Android, the “Cliq” With MOTOBLUR

Motorola’s first Android phone was announced today by Motorola CTO Sanjay Jha at GigaOm’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco.  The phone is Motorola Cliq MB200, which looks like the same phone that was widely leaked as the Morrison.  Thankfully the toy-like bright blue trim featured in most of the leaked shots has been replaced by basic black.  Specs include: 3.1-inch HVGA touch-screen display 5 megapixel auto focus camera with geo tagging, video capture and 24 fps playback 3.5mm headset jack … Continue reading

Google Voice App Released For Android and BlackBerry

This morning Google took another step toward making mobile operators irrelevant by releasing a  Google Voice application for Android and Blackberry devices.  I’ve been using Google Voice since it launched. If you are unfamiliar with the service, Wikipedia has an excellent overview. In summary,  Google Voice gives you a new (currently U.S. only) local number.  Calls and texts to your Google Voice number are routed by Google Voice to one or more mobile, Gizmo5  VOIP or land-line numbers that you … Continue reading

No Free Prepaid T-Zones For Android

For many years T-Mobile in the U.S has offered a little freebie to its Pay As You Go customers – T-Zones,  a walled garden of mobile web sites. It includes basic account management features  like checking you balance, adding funds and switching between the two available prepaid plans.  That’s hardly unusual, lots of operators have free mobile web based account management sites for users without data plans,  but the T-Zones homepage also offers unlimited access to the ABC News mobile … Continue reading

iGoogle For the iPhone and Android. It’s Baack!

There was quite a bit of furor on the interwebs back in January when Google  killed the special version of the iGoogle personalized home page for the iPhone and Android devices. Google’s explanation at the time was that they wanted to provide a consistent experience across all devices. Which didn’t make much sense given the big Gs enthusiasm for cloud based web services running in advanced mobile web browsers as a replacement for installable apps. For the last five months … Continue reading

Mobile is Big at the Google I/O Developer Conference

I just got back from the first day of Google I/O. What an exciting day for mobile web advocates like me. In the keynote CEO Eric Schmidt and Vice President of Developer Platforms Vic Gundotra said “mobile” so many times I lost count.  There were some significant announcements and Schmidt promises even bigger ones tomorrow.  From the keynote to the “After Hours” party, it was a long day.  I’ve only had time to write up a few highlights but will … Continue reading

I’m Going to Google I/O!

I’ll be at Google I/O in San Francisco tomorrow and Thursday.  Mostly I’ll be haunting the mobile sessions, although I want to take in a some of the App Engine and AJAX ones too. It looks like the mobile track is all Android, which is great.  With the slew of recent Android device announcements and project head Andy Rubin recently saying that Android is “revolutionary“, I’m hoping for some major Android news out of I/O this year. I also want … Continue reading