The rebirth of cool

Posted by Silas Reyes, Webmaster, Mobile team

Have you ever been involved in a project that you've seen evolve from an idea to a work in progress to a full-fledged product? I just had that experience with mobile.google.com. If you visited that URL yesterday, you would have seen some pretty basic information presented in a fairly simple format. Today you'll find a streamlined layout and some new ways to learn about Google's mobile offerings. Want to take a live test run of the traffic feature on Google Maps for mobile? Or maybe figure out how to stay on top of your Gmail using your phone? We've included video tutorials or emulators for every service or application, and we've designed the pages in such a way as to make it easy to learn more about the mobile offerings you're interested in. You can even have Google send a link to your mobile device via a text message that will help you start using Google mobile services with just a few clicks. You just enter your mobile number on the desktop version of mobile.google.com and we'll text you the link.

My favorite part of the site is probably the Google SMS demo. I think this SMS search is one of the coolest out there, and I'm always urging my friends and family to give it a try. The demo shows you firsthand just how useful and easy to use SMS is, with more than a dozen sample queries to try out and a search box for typing in your own. In fact I'm playing around with it now -- did you know that you can use Google SMS to get the address of an Ethiopian restaurant in Chicago, the exchange rate for dollars to baht, a weather forecast for Wamego, Kansas, or the score of the latest MLB playoff game?

Anyway, if you haven't already, head over to this new improved site and give it a whirl. And as always, don't be shy about sending us feedback -- we're always looking for ways we can make it even better.