Your Favorite Web Apps Go Offline With Google Gears for Windows Mobile
Google Gears is now available for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, which means you can enjoy offline mobile access to your favorite Google Gears-enabled sites.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the announcement is the Google is essentially embracing the web-as-the-future-of-mobile-apps espoused by Steve Jobs when the iPhone was first announced.
However, Google uses a slightly different logic — essentially that developing native mobile apps is a pain because of the myriad of different OSes/platforms. With web apps on the other hand, as the Google Gears Blog suggests, the differences are minimal.
Furthermore, we plan to keep the Gears API consistent across all platforms. So as long as you account for browser differences (such as different screen sizes and DOM quirks), the rest of your application will “just work” across users’ systems. You don’t need to worry whether you are running on a mobile device or a desktop machine.
Of course that logic is a bit like a slap in the face to Google’s Android mobile platform, which is ostensibly supposed to provide exactly the sort of interoperability that the Gears blog is arguing doesn’t exist.
Still, if we’ve learned anything from the iPhone, it’s that there’s room for both native and web apps on your mobile device and the Gears support in Windows Mobile is a nice addition for developers.
Google says that it plans to add support for more mobile web browsers in the future, but for the moment iPhone fans are out of luck (so are those using Opera Mobile on their phones).
As part of the release Zoho Writer is announcing support for Windows Mobile 6.0, which allows you to view your documents without a web connection. Zoho is planning to add editing capabilities in the future, though when it comes to mobile access, read-only is probably fine for most users.
The other app that’s part of the launch is Buxfer which provides access to your bank account balances, transactions and expense tracking tools.
To get some idea of how Google Gears works in Windows Mobile, have a look at this video from Zoho, which shows Writer on a mobile device.
[Screenshot courtesy of Zoho]
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