Google

The last year has seen a great deal of speculation about Google introducing a mobile phone onto the market. In the last few months, it has become fairly clear that Google would not in fact be releasing a mobile phone - but instead was creating an open source mobile phone operating system that would integrate fully with Google's existing services and offer developers the ability to create a wide array of applications for mobile phones.

Yesterday, Google released a new version of their popular RSS feed reader intended for use on the Apple iPhone. Google created the new version of the reader as an exercise in using the Google Web Toolkit to create feature-rich applications for the iPhone. The Google Web Toolkit, or GWT, is a development toolkit which allows users to avoid the many pitfalls and frustrations of Javascript browser compliance when authoring AJAX web applications by letting programmers author these applications in Java.

Technically, the new web application isn't Google Reader. It's a more bare bones RSS reader and as such is formally called the GWT Feed Reader. That said, at the end of the day, it's a feed aggregator and reader that Google offers. Its desktop counterpart is Google Reader.

Though it probably comes as little surprise, the iPhone-geared Google Reader's interface jives quite nicely with

Though it was previously revealed that Google was working on and offering an iPhone targeted search as part of their User Distributed Search project, Google is now seemingly suggesting that iPhone users use their standard mobile portal instead of the UDS search offering.

Assumably through a user agent check, users visiting the Google home page from their iPhone are

Things had been quiet for a while on the Google Phone rumors front, but it looks like talk about the device has surfaced again. Only, this time, the concept is looking much less like a rumor and more like an inevitability.

Reports have been surfacing which indicate that Google has been showing off a prototype mobile phone to different carriers. According to an article published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, Google is showing the the prototype around while continuing to hone and improve the product to offer a browsing and internet experience superior to what is currently available.

Additionally, the Google phone will reportedly offer free service. Instead of

If you're bothered by scrolling around and zooming on your iPhone when trying to search for something on Google, you might be happy to hear that Google is offering an iPhone-sized interface to their famed search engine.

This scaled down version of the standard Google search offers only 8 results per page, and omits clickable options such as similar pages and cached. That said, users may find the scaled down version more useable on the iPhone as the fonts are readable without zooming and less scrolling is needed when navigating returned results.

A scaled down version of Google's image and news searches are also available.