Google's initial Google Gears release for Internet Explorer Mobile will run on devices powered by the Windows Mobile 5 and 6 operating systems, said Google Mobile Team Product Manager Charles Wiles. However, Google is also working "to bring Google Gears for mobile to Android and other mobile platforms with capable Web browsers," he added.

Hiding Latency Issues

Whether commuting to the office or visiting customers and business partners, road warriors often find themselves without access to a wireless network . And even when they do have a wireless connection, the time delay or latency that occurs from the moment when a data request is initiated until it brings results can make Web applications appear sluggish.

Google Gears for mobile is aimed at giving developers an offline capability that hides "latency issues through controlled caching of data and storage of information between sessions," Wiles said.

Google Gears can also help companies cut network charges while boosting the productivity of mobile workers, said Dave Burke, a Google engineering manager based in London. "On a mobile, the network round trip can be quite expensive," he said. "Google Gears allows you to bring the data over once and be able to do a lot of latency-hiding techniques."

A New Paradigm

Google's latest mobile offering is derived from the technology it launched for desktop PCs and notebooks last year. To enable work to be conducted in an offline mode, Google Gears periodically synchronizes data in a device's cache with the online service . If a network suddenly becomes unavailable, synchronization is deferred until the connection can be re-established.

So many tethered computers today have dedicated broadband connections that Google's initial offering was most applicable in the notebook arena. "To us, Gears makes even more sense in the mobile world because mobile devices suffer a lot more from connectivity problems than a laptop or a desktop computer," said Google engineer Andrei Popescu.

Google believes that in the future the Web will become the primary platform for delivering mobile applications, Popescu noted. "And we thought that Gears would be the perfect technology to port to mobile browsers because it already provides a set of Web APIs that have some traction out on the Web," he said.

A handful of Windows Mobile Web applications already exist that use Gears, Wiles said. For example, Zoho Writer documents can be viewed using Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile devices regardless of network availability. And Buxfer's mobile interface enables users to gain access to bank balances, transactions and charts on the fly.