Google Gmail And Calendar Will Soon Run Offline

Within six weeks, Google Gmail and Google Calendar will be Google Gears-enabled, meaning that they'll run offline.That at least is the report from Royal Bank of Scotland researcher Andrew Fogg, via Twitter. Ionut Alex Chitu, on his Google Operating System blog, has repeated Fogg's reportage.

Since a thing said thrice is made true, or so certain government officials suggest, take my repetition of this tale as confirmation.

Google didn't immediately respond to a request to confirm this or deny Fogg's assertion. Everyone at the company is probably busy wrangling champagne to celebrate the quarterly financial results that were just reported: $5.37 billion in revenue, up 39% from the second quarter of 2007.

But Google has said that it expects to bring offline functionality to Gmail and Calendar. It didn't develop Gears just as a lark. Google Docs and Google Reader have been Gears-enabled already. Fogg said that Google will be adding SyncML support for Gmail contacts. SyncML is a synchronization standard for mobile devices and Fogg speculates that this will work with Apple's iPhone 3G.

I'm looking forward to it.

Update: Moments after I posted this blog entry, a Google spokesperson responded: "We're working on Gears-enabling a number of our products, but we don't have a specific time line to announce." (Perhaps the champagne was nixed because Google's results fell shy of Wall Street expectations.)