Guide to Google Gears for Mobile

Geolocation API
Google Gears isn’t just designed to provide offline capabilities for web-based applications and services. For example, the built-in Gears Geolocation API provides Windows Mobile users with a way to get a more precise estimate of their location. As long as Gears for Mobile is installed, the API will use your handset’s cell-ID or on-board GPS (if either is available) to improve a position fix. Not all handsets support this technology, but the HTC Touch Dual, Touch Diamond, TyTN II and O2 XDA Orbit certainly do.

lastminute.com makes use of the Geolocation API. The developers have recently location-enabled their new mobile restaurant finder so you can now trace nearby restaurants without having to type in your location.

If you have a compatible handset, open IE Mobile, go to m.lastminute.com, tap the fonefood link and then the Find your Location link on the home page. Now select the type of restaurant you want and lastminute.com will automatically work out your current location and find nearby matching restaurants.

Mobile web applications and services look set to grow in popularity, not least of all because trying to write cross-platform mobile client applications can be fraught with problems. For instance, the vast array of mobile operating systems and their idiosyncrasies makes it difficult to build feature-rich applications that work on every device.

A growing number of developers are now choosing to write applications that deploy directly to mobile browsers rather than opting to create native mobile applications. This serves to simplify the development process quite markedly.

Google Gears for Mobile is still in its infancy, but more and more developers are making use of the free open-source coding and without doubt, the ability to be able to work with web applications, services and documents when offline will add functionality to the vast majority of connected Windows Mobile handsets.

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