Google demos prototype of mobile Gmail app

>> I'm putting on my mobile hat.

>> Yep

>> I feel a lot of pain at Google that I suspect many in your audience do which is if you're gonna build an application what do you build it for?

>> Yep

>> You just mentioned iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm, there's Nokia, for the rest of . . .

>> Yep

>> the world there's Android and it costs a huge amount of money to build a development team that can do all of those different platforms. In fact I would say for most start up's it's beyond their reach and they just pick 1 or 2 platforms. What's happening now is for the first time the internet, the web on these phones is emerging as a viable platform instead and so I wanted to show you an app. This app is built using HTML 5, the latest standards available with new web browsers. I'm going to show you the app on the iPhone first.

Inaudible comment

>> So can we bring that up here? Ok. So what you're looking at, let's see if I can center that. What you're looking at is Gmail written as a web app on the iPhone and it is incredible. It's incredibly fast. I've got some cool new features here. I can select multiple messages; you'll note the floating bar that appeared there at the top. As I move down you'll see that floating bar will move with me. It allows me to archive my messages very easily. You can see the starred labels. It's really a full functional app, but it's built using HTML 5, so it uses things like the offline cache capability. So you'll note that I'm not even connected. Look in the top left there. I'm in airplane mode, I have no internet connection and yet, if I was to select a message, I can open up that message. It's all cached offline. Now this is the technical prototype. Stay tuned.

>> So when, when do we get access to this?

>> We're working on that.

>> For special friend of Mr. Rick right?

Laughter

>> But I want to show you here's the kicker. Look at this. What you're looking at now is let's see here, I got this, there we go. You are looking at exactly the same app; there we go, running on Android. Now think about that for a moment. My development team was able to have 1 code base using the rich new features of HTML 5 app cache, the data base, work a pool threads, and we were able to build that for both the iPhone and Android because they have this powerful web kit browser. Imagine if you could build apps that ran across all these phones because of the web. The web would have won as a dominant platform.

>> Yep

>> And so that's what gets us really excited. I would stay tuned for this and I think that right now it's a technical prototype but when we make it broadly available I think people are really gonna see this as the first HTML 5 mobile web app from a flagship app like Gmail. Like Gmail was in April of 2004, it was a great watershed moment for HX apps. I don't think people realize what you can do in the mobile web because of these powerful browsers and when this thing is released I think you're eagerly looking forward to hearing feedback from people as to what they think.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Techologies ====