In its pursue for rich web applications for mobile, Google has taken it’s Gear product to mobile.

From the announcement Power up your mobile web applications:

“It’s a fully functional port of Google Gears v0.2 that can be used to develop offline capability into your mobile web applications. You can also create slick and responsive applications by hiding latency issues through controlled caching of data and storage of information between sessions. We’re also working to bring Google Gears for mobile to Android and other mobile platforms with capable web browsers.”

It is a good start. But to make it to truly impact the mobile industry, it needs to be available across all browsers and in a consistent (even standardized) way! Unfortunately, we are not there yet. For this to happen, we need mobile browsers that are extensible, perhaps via plug-ins. I will expect to see Gears for Mobile first targeted at any mobile browser with a Plug-in API, such as BlackBerry, Web Kit, and so on.

When I initially I read about this announcement, I thought that Google had also taken the step to provide access to local functionality on the handset beyond storage (access to GPS, camera, PIM, etc), but unfortunately that wasn’t the case; I was a bit disappointed about that… The next big thing in mobile web are lightweight browser-based applications with access to local functionality… It’s about the (mobile web) runtime!

Google Gears for Mobile announcement video:

Related to this, see:

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