When Google held its first Google Factory Tour last 2005, it mentioned in one of the presentations how they are seeing enormous potential and possibilities in mobile devices. True to the reality of the web industry, the Mobile space is indeed one market that is ripe for the picking for web companies like Google and Yahoo. Granted, Google still hasn’t pulled out an ace from its sleeves and delivered a killer mobile app (their decision not to focus on dodgeball still baffles most people), but one thing that they’re doing right is making sure that most of its services are accessible through a mobile interface. Though the company started slow in this space, the Google portfolio of mobile versions of their apps has improved and is continuously expanding. Now it’s clear that Google has a serious agenda in the Mobile space.

This post aims to guide you on where to go (and what to expect) to access Google mobile web apps. If you’ve just started depending on your mobile device as your only way to access the internet, then this is a good starting point.

The Google Mobile Products home is the central jump point for all the mobile web apps offered by Google. Using your phone’s web browser, go to this page: http://www.google.com/m/products . From there you select on any of the eight existing Google mobile products (two of which belongs to the Google labs). Below is the list current Google mobile applications, and their corresponding URL.

Google Search (http://www.google.com/xhtml)

Google search mobile has currently two working products: the classic ui works like a traditional search user interface (although optimized to work well on a mobile device), where you have to choose the desired search type (images, web, local listings or the mobile web which searches on mobile-friendly pages). The new interface is simpler. It uses only a single search box then Google automatically searches images, businesses (local) news and other services.

Maps

To use Google Maps, you have to download their mobile application from http://www.google.com/gmm. It is a java-based app so if your phone or pda has java support, It will most likely be supported.

Gmail (http://m.gmail.com/)

Gmail can be accessed through the web native interface and through Google’s excellent Gmail Java application. The Gmail mobile application is recommended if your mobile device supports it java. It features a very good user interface catered for the mobile user and allows you to open email attachments such as photos, word documents and pdf files.

Calendar (http://google.com/calendar/m)

The Google mobile calendar provides a reformatted view of the original calendar that takes a cues from the agenda view. It shows a list of your appointments grouped by date. You can also use the famous quick add feature to quickly enter events (e.g. dinner on tuesday).

News
Google news provides a simple interface for accessing news items on your mobile device. It supports all the sections included in the web-desktop version as well as support for custom section for your personalized news

Photos (Picasaweb)
Google mobile photos shows your Picasaweb albums in a very concise and mobile-friendly format. It’s the latest addition to the suite of Google mobile products.

Blogger
Blogger support for mobile devices is at the moment very limited. The current implementation just allows you to create a new blog from your mobile device by sending pictures to go@blogger.com. Tying your phone number to that new blog created.

Google Reader
Although still under the Labs, Google reader for mobile provides an excellent way of reading your RSS subscriptions through the mobile device.

Right now those are the existing mobile versions of the Google applications and services that many or us are probably using. There are other two mobile prodcuts being offered by the company right now:

Google SMS, which is an SMS interface to the Google search, and Goog411

Goog411
This is an experimental Voice Local search service being offered by Google to mobile customers.