Mobile Gmail

Google has finally released a mobile interface to Gmail. I was waiting for this for a while now, even hacked the gmail-lite source to make it look good on mobile.
Seems like there are few teething problems, the page doesn't render in firefox (br element is not closed) and the style element is in the wrong place (should be inside the head not body element). Im also having problems retrieving contacts when composing a message.
Appart from that, its something you would expect from Google. The pages are quick and easy to browse, there are settings that let you configure which views to make visible.
A lot of content is transcoded on the fly (PDF, images) and displayed in the message, embeded links a re re-written to go through the google mobile proxy, embeded email addresses when clicked initiate new message composing, contacts can be dialed directly, etc.
They have pretty much used all mobile-browser capabilities.
As with google local mobile, which first had a xhtml version and then evolved into a full blown feature packed midp application, I would expect a similar evolution here: a complete email/IM application. (Let's not forget Talk, XMPP is nothing new on midp).

Well done Google, and keep up the mobile developments!
via Engadget

Google to acquire Opera

Very interesting rumors about Google buying Opera. It would make perfect sense. Google's Local for Mobile midlet is a great app, and with the amount of Google apis available, I was wondering if it was just an enticement of what's to come from Google in the mobile web arena.
Opera's recent announcement about Enabling AJAX applications on mobile phones would suddenly allow Google to bring all it's cool services straight to the mobile desktop. Your Personalized Home could become the new idle screen on your phone, keeping you up-to-date the news/weather/rss etc. Gmail and Talk would be just a click away, and utilizing the WAP -push technology, could offer some real advantages over sms (think storage, searching, cost, etc). Moblogging, pod/video-casting could become much easier.
On top of all that Google would get a decent desktop browser and a leading mobile browser too. I am sure they could probably share a few ideas between the Google mobile proxy and the Opera Accelerator.
Of course, there is no reason Google can't do any of this on its own but as Carlo points out:
But keep in mind what are Opera's most significant relationships: deals to get its browser on handsets from some of the world's top mobile phone manufacturers. That would be instant traction for Google on some very big real estate.

We'll have to wait and see ....

--dean