01-23-2006, 04:00 PM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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Tons Of Uses For Google On Your Device
Everyone's favorite search engine, Google, has been getting better and better each year in working with mobile devices. I thought I'd recap some of the features and maybe introduce a few new ones. First up is a web optimizer from Google, pointed out to us by Philippe Bueche.
Figure 1: The Google Optimizer at http://www.google.com/gwt/n
You don't search using this service. Rather, you input your favorite URL and Google fetches it, cutting down the site for your screen and optimizing the connection for low bandwidth connections like GPRS or 1xRTT. I don't have anything to test the throughput with but it did seem faster. I guess it would also lighten the monthly bill for those not on all-you-can-eat plans. You can see the result below.
Figure 2: My personal site, www.eHansberry.com as seen through the Google Optimizer.
Note at the bottom you have the ability to turn off images, or you could tell it to remove the images before the search begins in figure 1. If you want to see how well this works, try a site that looks horrible on a Pocket PC, like CNN's front page. Note this also works on the desktop, so if you are modem bound, this can make your browsing life easier.
Next up is GMail for your device. Several months ago, Google modified the GMail web page to work with non-IE browsers by stepping down to less feature rich but more compatible HTML code. It works OK for a Windows Mobile device, but you still get some side-to-side scrolling an probably more data than is necessary. Of course, you can bypass IE altogether and use the POP3 option on your Windows Mobile device, provided it supports POP3 over SSL. Now there is a third alternative. It is a web page specifically made for mobile devices, which you can find at http://m.gmail.com
Figure 3: The new GMail for Mobile Devices page
As you can see, it is seriously stripped down, but it allows you to get at your labels, compose emails, etc. I suspect this will work on a number of cell phones that have decent browsers on them.
One of Google's more useful services is its online price/store finder, Froogle. Now, you can Froogle your way to savings on your mobile device. Simply visit http://wml.froogle.com and you'll see this page.
Figure 4:Google's Froogle on your mobile device
Simply type in your search query and up pops figure 5.
Figure 5:Froogle search results.
The problem here though is none of those links are clickable. :? I guess Google is assuming you are price shopping at a store to see if there are better deals online, not actually wanting to make the purchase on your mobile device. It certainly is a better option than using the Google SMS option on your phone. Oh yeah, that reminds me, send an SMS message with the word "help" to GOOGL, or 46645 and you'll see what I mean if you dig into the pricing options.
OK, enough with extra stuff. Let's see what Google does for you if you are trying to do what Google does best, which is search the web. First up is classic Google, which you can get by simply visiting http://www.google.com
Figure 6:The classic Google search
Notice that it added the "/pda" at the end. If you have a registry hack in place to cause your browser to masquerade as a desktop browser, you won't get that. For that matter, none of the tips in this article may work properly if you have such a hack in place. The "/pda" page simply gives you a tighter page with less data on it. Searching gives you the following output.
Figure 7Output of the search
You'll note that the output is much lighter than what you'd see on your desktop. You still get a brief summary of the page, but the cached version isn't available, nor is the "similar page" feature. Some of you may remember the "/palm" extension. Go ahead, try it. It reroutes to the "/pda" page you see in figure 6. The old Palm page looked similar to the PDA page, except it was black and white. I guess once Palm devices finally got more than 4 bit color screens, Google decided to show us the web in color. 
Closely related to this page is the "/xhmtl" page, or http://www.google.com/xhtml
Figure 8:The Google XHTML page
You'll note that the page has a few more options than does the search shown in figure 6, namely "Local" and "Mobile", the latter of which is classified as beta. Here, I did the same search as I did in figure 7 and look at the output.
Figure 9:Output of Google's XHTML page using the "Mobile Web" option
The output of figure 9 is different than that of figure 7. Figure 7 matches your desktop output. Figure 9 though is only showing you what it available on what Google calls the "mobile web." As far as I can tell, this is used synonymously with WAP, which means when you click on a link, you get pure text with very basic HTML. I also suspect that it would not give you web pages formatted for Pocket Internet Explorer, though I didn't test it extensively. Note that this a very constricted way to search. A search for my name yielded zero hits, so I, apparently, am not spoken of in the "mobile web." If, in figure 8, you select "Web" instead of "Mobile Web" you'll get the same output as you see in figure 7.
Now, let's take a look at the other search options on the XHTML page. First, is images. Google has a great image search engine on the desktop, but that kind of bandwidth would be horrible on a mobile device, even over EVDO or WiFi. Pocket IE simply isn't built to show 20-30 images at once. That's ok, because this "Image" feature limits the output to two or three images per page.
Figure 10:The Image Search feature from the XHTML page.
In figure 10, I simply typed in "Pocket PC genius" and not only did it know to cross reference that with my name, it pulled up my picture! :lol: OK, what about the "local" search option? Turns out, that works pretty well too. One of my favorite places to eat is a pizzeria called The Mellow Mushroom." They have an awesome white pizza there. Mmmmmmm... pizza...... er.. ahem. Sorry. Spaced out there for a second. So, I typed in Mellow Mushroom, selected local and pressed search. You get another page that asks you to narrow it down so it knows where local is. Just type in your city and state and country (it does seem to work in Europe) and press search again. You get the following screen.
Figure 11:Initial search result for Local search.
Now, simply find the locale of your choice and tap the name.
Figure 12:Google Maps on your Pocket PC
Now you get something that looks like Google Maps. It isn't quite as dynamic as Google Maps on your PC, but it gets the job done. You can zoom in and out, shift directions and finally, get driving directions from your current location.
Last, but not least, is another search mechanism. This one actually goes back several years. Simply visit http://www.google.com/ie. The "/ie" extension isn't really for mobile devices, It is for the sidebar in Internet Explorer on your desktop. As you can see, the page isn't particularly lightweight with that big advertisement for the Google toolbar.
Figure 13:Google's IE sidebar search page
What is useful to you is the output. Take a look. This is the same search I executed in figure 6 above.
Figure 14:Output of Google's IE sidebar search
This only gives you the page titles. You have to trust Google has done a good job of searching, as it usually does. There is far less bandwidth consumed on these pages than on figures 7 and 9, which could be helpful if you need to tap the "next page" link a few times to look for a particular page.
Finally is Google's home page optimized for mobile devices. We showed you this earlier this week but I might as well include it in this article.
Figure 15:Google's Personalized Home Page for mobile devices.
The Google Personalized Home Page is best set up on your PC by going to Google's main page and logging in. Once configured, on your device just go to one of Google's search pages, like figure 6 or 8, and tap the "Personalized Home" link and log in.
So, that is a quick wrap-up of Google's mobile device offerings today, and it is very possible I missed some. Google is doing so many things right now it is hard to keep track. Given everything above, it almost makes it worthwhile to add a "Google" folder in your Pocket IE favorites. Note too that there are tons of features built into Google's search engine that go way beyond the simple query. For example searching for 5+5 will give you 10. You can find all sorts of tricks at Google's Feature page, and they should all work on the mobile device just fine. Did I miss any? Do you have any Google favorite tricks on your mobile device?
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01-23-2006, 04:13 PM
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Sage
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 797
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One area where Google blew it though, was on the mobile Gmail they started automatically optimizing links in the e-mails for mobile devices. When I get a comment notification from this site, and click it, instead of getting the PPCT mobile page, I get a Gmail optimized version of the regular forums.
That sucks and they should give people an option to turn it off.
That being said, I used the image search this weekend with my wife while we were at Starbucks, and we were both totally impressed. It worked great and solved a bit of a disagreement.
Guess you always have to take the good with the bad.
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01-23-2006, 05:02 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 34
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Personalization
Ed,
Thanks for the write up I added most of the links as favorites.
Question, I tried personalizing my homepage via the PC, but it was not taking the changes. Like the city for weather or adding the gmail link, etc.
Any ideas?
PS Tried from both Firefox and IE
Rick :?:
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01-23-2006, 08:19 PM
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Philosopher
Join Date: Jan 2004
Posts: 589
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by vincenzosi
One area where Google blew it though, was on the mobile Gmail they started automatically optimizing links in the e-mails for mobile devices. When I get a comment notification from this site, and click it, instead of getting the PPCT mobile page, I get a Gmail optimized version of the regular forums.
That sucks and they should give people an option to turn it off.
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I'm not sure 100% how this could be caught server-side, either. Looking at the header sent with phpinfo(), the only thing that jumps out is this server variable:
$_SERVER["HTTP_VIA"] 1.1 proxy.google.com:80 (squid)
The mobile optimizer keeps the UserAgent as " Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0;)", which is a bit misleading. Perhaps sometime soon Google will make its own user agent so we can filter it out server-side. Any server techies have any ideas on how to adapt our server-side mobile redirection scripts to work with this new Google feature? I fear that searching for the proxy.google.com proxy will also affect the standard crawling that Google does, but I'm a bit of a neophyte when it comes to the google dance.
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01-23-2006, 10:16 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 93
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by vincenzosi
One area where Google blew it though, was on the mobile Gmail they started automatically optimizing links in the e-mails for mobile devices. When I get a comment notification from this site, and click it, instead of getting the PPCT mobile page, I get a Gmail optimized version of the regular forums.
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i personally like this feature a lot, and i would be disappointed if it were removed.
one thing i want them to do though, is enable Yahoo! password forms. they have disabled them for security purposes i guess.
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01-23-2006, 10:18 PM
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Sage
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 797
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by msafi
i personally like this feature a lot, and i would be disappointed if it were removed.
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I definitely didn't say to remove it, only to give people the option to turn it off.
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01-24-2006, 01:34 AM
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Oracle
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 866
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Excellent post!! Google does really well for us mobile users!
I do have a question though. Would it be possible to include a link in forum notifications that takes us to the mobile version of the forum post? When I check email on my SP5 and get a PPCT Forum notice, I click the link but I get the full page, not the mobile forum. Any way of adding an extra link to that email to go to the mobile page?
Thanks!
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01-24-2006, 02:06 AM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by MitchellO
I do have a question though. Would it be possible to include a link in forum notifications that takes us to the mobile version of the forum post? When I check email on my SP5 and get a PPCT Forum notice, I click the link but I get the full page, not the mobile forum. Any way of adding an extra link to that email to go to the mobile page?
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that is how it works. as some here have suggested, if you click on ghat link in gmail on the web, the browser is routed to a google mobile-optimized version of the full site. that shouldn't happen in your pop3 gmail account in inbox.
also, if you have a reg hack on the browser string? that would fool the PPCT web server.
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01-24-2006, 02:15 AM
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Oracle
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 866
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I always use Gmail in IE on my SP5. The google optimized page just isn't as good as the proper PPCT Mobile forum.
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01-24-2006, 02:54 AM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by MitchellO
I always use Gmail in IE on my SP5. The google optimized page just isn't as good as the proper PPCT Mobile forum.
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then consider POP3. that is what I use on my ppc.
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Linear Mode
