Wirelessnorth.ca

Google made waves yesterday by announcing a new app for the iPhone bundling a whole bunch of google application goodness into a single iPhone application interface. With the google package you get search, gmail, rss reader and more. hmm, one more reason to import a grey market iPhone?

Why else is this interesting? Because this Google application is not really an application at all. It’s Web-app running on AJAX. [Ajax is the set scripting tools that make modern web applications run a lot more smoothly and dynamically than old-school web sites which used to have to refresh the whole page to change any information on the screen - most mobile WAP sites are still very much stuck in this world.] Traditionally, the trouble has been that AJAX is too complicated and computationally intensive to bundle with a mobile browser – but not any longer, with more powerful computer-in-diguise devices like the iPhone.

Through combinations of better browsers, mobile AJAX and Flash, we’re going to see a lot more mobile web that give Java apps (and even their desktop web equivalents) a run for their money in terms of interface quality. In theory, rich web-apps should make it a lot easier for developers to cost effective to roll out better mobile software without having to wrestle with the fragmented mess that is mobile java implementations.

One day, all phones out there will have web browsers at least as awesome.

For the moment though, this particular Google application only runs on one device… the Apple iPhone. Fragmentation problem, not so solved.