Google Gears Mobile

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Google has brought offline apps to mobile phones. This is a separate undertaking to Android, their mobile phone platform.

Google Gears allows developers to create apps that run on Firefox and Internet Explorer when offline. Initially it will only support Pocket IE running on Windows Mobile devices, but eventually it will expand to other browsers. Presumably this will include Safari on the iPhone and Opera Mobile, but there’s no clarification on this issue yet.

On its launch, several partners (including Zoho and Buxfer) introduced mobile apps which can run on Pocket IE even when not connected to the network. Zoho Writer, which first went offline on Google Gears in August, will now be available for Windows Mobile 6. The offline version is read-only.

In the pipeline are a Google Gear’s version of Google Docs, and offline desktop versions of Gmail and Google Calendar.

Adobe and Microsoft risked being left behind, since they had yet to announce mobile versions of AIR and Silverlight. Microsoft obviously realised this and made a countermove with the announcement that there will be a mobile version of Silverlight for Nokia phones.

Here’s Google’s Charles Wiles introducing Google Gears:

Source: TechCrunch

Tags: Apps