Google Gears Gingerly Enters the Mobile Fray … What, no iPhone?

Implications: Google Gears delivers interactive applications that run offline to a place where these applications will certainly excel, on a mobile device.  However, the users most likely to use it, iPhone users, aren’t on the list and neither are Nokia users.  Are they just seeding for the Android launch?

Analysis:

Google Gears delivers interactive applications that run offline to a place where they will certainly excel, on a mobile device.  The relatively slow connection to data networks, especially in the absence of a WiFi connection, makes the utility of offline, or off-Internet, applications increasingly important on mobile phones.

 

However, the big users of Google Gears, as a widget, will unlikely be users of phones with Microsoft Mobile software.  The Microsoft Mobile browser has already been passed by the Safari browser, even thought the Apple iPhone with Safari has a much lower installed base.  Use of the Internet is much less, in large part due to the user experience of Microsoft Mobile, which means that this consumer group is also going to be less likely to use the online to offline applications, or widgets, that Google Gears stimulates.  Additionally, a significant number of those likely consumers have already fled to the iPhone or are using Blackberry Rim products.

 

The big win, off the get go, would be to integrate Google Gears into the Apple iPhone, and perhaps Google will announce support for the Safari browser, especially with the launch of the iPhone SDK.  Google Gears may have a somewhat similar problem on PCs, as I would expect Firefox or Safari users to be larger widget users, but the Microsoft installed base on PCs is dominant, with a decreasing but still huge 75% market share.  Of course, the end around is the integration into the mobile Google Android platform, but that market is completely untested, with no phones available to date.

 

Google Gears is certainly good news for the mobile industry, as they can serve a unique and important role in mobile, perhaps more important than in the desktop world.