Topics: Mobile

Tech Turf Gives Windows Mobile Users Quick Access To Google Services

Posted by Eric Zeman, Feb 26, 2008 10:54 AM

This new application from The Tech Turf provides Windows Mobile smartphones with an iPhone-like dashboard that can quickly access a wide range of Google services. The app is called Google2Go! (not to be confused with Yahoo's Go for Mobile) and speeds up Web searches, as well as provides visual shortcuts to other sites such as Amazon.

Developer Brian Burkholder got tired of waiting for Google to offer a mobile service similar to Yahoo's Go for Mobile, which gives users access to a dashboard of customizable Web content. So he developed his own. Google2Go, Burkholder points out, is in no way affiliated with Google itself. You can download the program for your Windows Mobile 6 smartphone here.

Said Burkholder: "The reason I wrote this app was I really like the Yahoo Go application, and wanted something similar for Google products. I think the UI is easier to use, and the application is quicker than using IE. And the application requires less page loads than IE, which potentially could lower data cost (if the user pays by MB or whatever)."

Once you have it installed, it brings up a dashboard with cloned iPhone icons. The icons quickly bring you to Google services such as Web and image search, as well as access to Google Calendar, Reader, Docs, News, Notes, GMail, and Picasa. Burkholder also stuck some icons in there to take you directly to Amazon, eBay, Weather.com, Wikipedia, and Dictionary/Thesaurus. It sort of looks like a visual set of bookmarks.

According to Tech Turf, new icons are in the works, and so is access to other Google services. Google2Go is an open source project and is a beta release. Burkholder is soliciting feedback and working on cleaning up the code.

Windows Mobile 6 users who have a little bit of iPhone envy should check it out and drop Burkholder a line to let him know what you think.

It will be interesting to see if Google responds with a dashboard of its own.

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