As we continue our week of all things mobile, we wanted to offer some tips and tricks to any marketers, advertisers, agencies, or businesses who want to use mobile as a platform to reach their customers. For ideas on how to work mobile into marketing campaigns, check out our post on the Agency blog.

Posted by Lauren Usui, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

This week, as part of our celebration of all things mobile, we posed you this question - what do you want to know? And you told us! After two days, 519 people submitted 133 questions and cast 4,607 votes. We saw some common themes in your questions, so we grouped several together to address some of the most popular topics.

Google Voice
We received an overwhelming number of Google Voice questions - 3 out of the top 5 questions were about Google Voice - and we're happy you're so enthusiastic about and interested in this new product! As far as making Voice available to more users, we began giving current users the ability to invite friends and family on Tuesday. We will continue sending out invitations to people who have requested them on our website, and we plan to make additional friends and family invitations available in the future. For those of you outside the US, we plan to make Google Voice available internationally; however, we don't have specifics to share at this time. As for new features, we're certainly evaluating which highly requested features we can add to improve Google Voice, such as number portability, though we don't have anything to announce quite yet. Keep up on the latest with Google Voice by following their blog at http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/.

Googlers' favorite phones
You asked us which phones are the most favored here on the Google mobile team. The answer's not particularly juicy, but it's honest: every phone! You'll see Googlers walking around campus carrying just about every phone under the stars, including multiple Android-powered devices, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Nokia, etc. And the Mobile team takes it up a notch. It's quite common for us to carry multiple phones at any given time, and as we sit down in a meeting, we often see someone unload five different phones from their pockets onto the table. Don't have the right one handy? We just head to our "Sky Lab" and grab one of the over 800 phones available. By using lots of different devices, we can make sure we're designing products that work well for you, no matter which device YOU are using. We understand that the phone someone chooses to use everyday varies with personal preference, but we generally prefer phones with great browsers and fast performance. Of course, it never hurts to have the newest toy on the block.

Google Wave for mobile
We're still early in Wave's preview, but you can currently access Google Wave on both Android-powered devices and the iPhone by pointing the phone's browser to wave.google.com. Please note that we're still in preview phase, and as we've mentioned before, you may experience occasional downtime or run into some bugs with Wave on your mobile phone, similar to when you access Google Wave from your computer.

Web vs. App
We're often asked why certain products, such as Google Reader, are available as a web application, accessible through the browser, and not a native, downloadable application. At Google, we believe in the power of the web to give us the flexibility to build one app that can run in the browser on multiple phones, rather than developing a different app for every platform. With more capable mobile browsers and technologies like HTML5 and Gears, web apps deliver a great experience because they closely mirror the desktop web in overall look, feel and functionality. They also let us iterate fast and add lots of cool features quickly without having to build from scratch each feature for various devices and platforms. Of course in some cases, investing in native applications for multiple platforms make sense. For example, with Google Maps for mobile, the native app lets us get your location or quickly process lots of data, such as map tiles. That said, new browsers and faster phones are allowing for more powerful web apps - such as Google Maps on Palm Pre or Google Latitude on iPhone - that can also get your location and that are almost as fast as native apps. In the end, there are a lot of users out there on a lot of phones, and we develop our products to put the best experience possible in your hands and your pockets.

In some cases, such as Gmail for certain phones, we offer both a native and web app because we want users to have choice in deciding how they access their information. We believe that both methods - web apps and native apps - offer a rich mobile experience, and we are committed to providing the best possible experience to users, regardless of the underlying development technology.

Mobile Product Roadmap
You also asked lots of great questions around product and feature development and availability. As we mentioned on the original Q & A page, we aren't able to provide forward-looking information on features or products, but we love your enthusiasm for ideas around how we can make existing Google Mobile products more useful or just make more Google Mobile products period. We're always working to improve all of our mobile products and will continue to do so with our eyes and ears open for your ideas and feedback. So keep it coming in the Google Mobile Blog, the Help Forum, and especially the Product Ideas page!

Go Mobile!


Posted by Chris Nguyen, Mobile Consumer Operations

We've published some tips, tricks, and stories on various blogs about our mobile products, including Search, YouTube, Maps, and Gmail. We've also started tweeting - check out the YouTube and Google Maps Twitter accounts for tips about those mobile products. And as a reminder, you have until 11:59pm Pacific time today to submit and vote on questions for the Google Mobile team. We'll be answering some of the top questions on this blog tomorrow.

Posted by Effie Seiberg, Google Mobile marketing

This week marks the anniversary of Star Trek's original pilot episode "The Cage", and with it, the first appearance of the iconic Communicator. As one of the inspirations for today's mobile devices, the Communicator did more than just long-range voice calls; in fact, many of its locator and universal translation services still outpace today's state of the art. What's more, the Communicator was so critical to the daily workings of Starfleet that cadets' 4-year curriculum included mandatory courses in communications engineering.

Today's brand of mobile user doesn't need four years to figure out their phone. But this week, and with a tip of the hat to the USS Enterprise for the Communicator's anniversary, we did want to celebrate all things mobile by sharing some of Google's favorite mobile tips and tricks. All week long, we're going to be tweeting and blogging our top tips for using Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, and more on your phone. We want to help every cadet go mobile, and get more out of their existing phone. Cadets with questions can ask them here until 11:59 PM Pacific Time, Tuesday night. Keep an eye on the Google Mobile Blog for answers to some of your questions on Wednesday, and tips for advertisers and developers later in the week. Everyone can boldly go... mobile!



Posted by Marc Vanlerberghe, Director of Mobile Marketing

I'm happy to announce Quick Search Box (QSB) for Android, a fast and versatile new system-wide search experience, available right from your phone's home screen. Since keystrokes are at a premium when you're typing on your phone, Quick Search Box provides suggestions as you type, making it easy to access whatever you're looking for by typing just a few characters.


Rather than giving you one search box for the web and another for your phone, QSB provides one single search box to let you search content on your phone, including apps, contacts, and browser history, as well as content from the web, like personalized search suggestions, local business listings, stock quotes, weather, and flight status, all without opening the browser. QSB even learns from your habits and provides faster access to the items you search for and use most often (by, for example, moving them higher on the suggestions list).

You can now also tap the microphone button next to the search box to search the web and call contacts by voice. The next time you want to search the web or call a friend, try speaking your query, like "pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset", or the name of a contact, like "Call Dave Burke, mobile phone", to save even more time. Note that voice search currently only works in English.

Finally, one of the coolest things about QSB is that it's not limited to searching what we think is useful - third party apps can also include suggestions in the list, making it faster to access the content you want from those apps, too. Look on Android Market for apps that support QSB, and enable their suggestions from the system search settings. (And if you're an app developer, check out our developer blog for more on how to leverage QSB for your app.)

We hope Quick Search Box will change the way you use your Android-powered phone by shortening the time and effort it takes to get the information you want while you're on the go. It's available in Android 1.6, so check it out and enjoy!



Posted by Mike LeBeau, Software Engineer

Finding the exact information you need sometimes requires filtering and refining your search results. Earlier in the year, we launched a collection of tools called Search Options which enable you to easily and quickly do this from a computer. Today in the US, we are making Search Options available on Android/iPhone/Palm WebOS devices so that you can slice and dice your mobile search results as well. For example, suppose you are shopping at a store for a camera, and you would like to see what users have been saying about a specific model within the past week. You can do this simply by searching for the name of the product. Then, on the search results page, use "Options" to filter by "Forums" and refine further by choosing "Past week". See the screenshots below for a sample query. Try these and other Search Options yourself by simply doing a mobile search on google.com and selecting Options.


Posted by Reza Ziaei, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

High-end mobile phones, like iPhone, Android-powered devices and the Palm Pre, continue to grow — Gartner estimates that global sales of smartphones will soar by 27% in 2009, to 177 million units. Naturally, as a result more and more people are browsing the web on the go.

Because these devices offer a browsing experience that is similar to desktop computers, advertising on smartphones is a natural extension for any AdWords campaign. However, it's not always been easy for advertisers to reach people on smartphones. That's why we're investing in new high-end mobile advertising products such as our search ad options for high-end phones and AdSense for mobile applications. We hope to make advertising on high-end mobile devices as intuitive, effective and user-friendly as our existing AdWords tools.

Today, we're excited to announce a new feature for our AdSense mobile publishers that enables them to serve text and image ads on their sites — specifically on these high-end smartphones. This helps mobile publishers earn revenue and fund more mobile-specific sites and web content.

New features like this help to nurture the smartphone ecosystem by encouraging the creation of more mobile content and by helping advertisers to grow their businesses by reaching new audiences. Our users' experience is also improved, with increasingly relevant and device-optimized mobile ads that load faster and fit better on small screens.

For more info about this feature, check out the Inside AdSense Blog.



Posted by Danielle VanDyke, Software Engineer