Finding the right place when you need it

Over the past few months, we have launched several new mobile search features for iPhone and Android-powered devices that make it easier to find local businesses. In the US, we launched an “open now” feature which lets you filter local search results to show only businesses that are open right now, based on their listed hours. When you’re hankering for pizza at 1 o’clock in the morning, this can be really handy:

Other local search options available globally include filtering by star ratings (find a highly-rated restaurant for your first date) and by distance (especially handy when you’re on foot).

You may have noticed other improvements as well, like the addition of images, reviews from around the web and bigger buttons for viewing a map or calling a business directly. Each business’s open hours are also shown in the result snippets.

If you haven’t used local search recently, now is a great time to try it out. Just go to www.google.com in your browser, tap on the “Places” link at the top of the page, and do a search. You can also access these features when searching for businesses on Google Maps for mobile on Android devices.

Posted by Yoshi Matsumoto and Keiji Maekawa, Software Engineers

5 tips for using Blogger on your Android phone

Earlier this month, we announced the first version of the Blogger app for Android on the Blogger Buzz blog. Today, we’d like to share some tips on how you can use the Blogger app to quickly publish posts when you’re on the go.

1. Attach photos as you compose

Take photos using your phone’s camera and instantly add them to your post while you draft. You can also insert photos from your phone’s gallery, all within the Blogger app.

2. Include your current location
With your phone’s GPS, you can let your readers know where you’re blogging from by selecting your current location, no additional typing needed.

3. Share to Blogger
Share videos, products, photos, links and other interesting things you would like to include in your blog via the share button that’s available in many apps, including Google Maps for mobile, YouTube, and your web browser. After you share an item to your Blogger, it will be inserted into new post that’s automatically created for you so that start can composing right away.

4. Switch across multiple Blogger accounts
If you’re an author of more than one blog, you can easily switch between your different accounts by tapping on the orange arrow next to the title of your blog. That way, you can publish articles for each of your blogs to keep your all of your readers up to date.

5. Keep track of published posts and saved drafts
See what you’ve composed in an easy to read list by tapping the list icon located on the top right-hand corner.

We hope that you enjoyed these blogging tips. If you haven’t done so already, you can download the free Blogger app for Android 2.1+ devices from Android Market or scan the QR code below. As always, we would love to hear what you think so please feel free to share your thoughts with us through our feedback form.

Happy blogging!

Posted by Shaun Seo, Product Manager, Blogger

Updates to the Google Reader app for Android

(Cross-posted from the Google Reader blog)

Today we’re excited to announce some updates to the official Google Reader app for Android. Over the last couple of months, we’ve added some of your most-requested features:

Unread count widget - choose any feed, label, person, or “all items” and get the unread count on your home screen. Clicking on the widget takes you to straight to that stream.

News ticker widget - if you prefer a bit more information, you can add a larger size widget that cycles through items on any stream you want in Reader. Clicking any headline will take you to the article, while clicking the folder will take you to that stream.

Mark previous as read - if you’ve used the mobile version of Reader before and missed this feature, it’s now back! As you scroll down your reading list, hit “Mark previous as read” at any time to only mark things above the screen as read.

In addition to these new features, we now have an official Russian translation as well.

We hope you enjoy the update - give it a try! You can download the app in all countries from Android Market. The Google Reader app is available for devices running Android 1.6 or higher, with widget functionality available for devices on Android 2.2+. 

Posted by Brian Shih, Product Manager

Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and Google Translate Blog.)

Back in August 2008, we launched a Google Translate HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today, the official Google Translate for iPhone app is available for download from the App Store. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new additions designed to improve your overall translation experience.

Speak to translate
The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to translate.

Listen to your translations
You can also listen to your translations spoken out loud in one of 23 different languages. This feature uses the same new speech synthesizer voices as the desktop version of Google Translate we introduced last month.

Full-screen mode
Another feature that might come in handy is the ability to easily enlarge the translated text to full-screen size. This way, it’s much easier to read the text on the screen, or show the translation to the person you are communicating with. Just tap on the zoom icon to quickly zoom in.

And the app also includes all of the major features of the web app, including the ability to view dictionary results for single words, access your starred translations and translation history even when offline, and support romanized text like Pinyin and Romaji.

You can download Google Translate now from the App Store globally. The app is available in all iOS supported languages, but you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch iOS version 3 or later.

Posted by Wenzhang Zhu, Software Engineer

Live Stream: Think Mobile event for mobile marketers

Looking to reach out to your customers on mobile? Join us for our live streamed discussion on February 10th, 1:05pm EST with Mary Meeker, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, Google’s Dennis Woodside, SVP of Americas Operations, and Jason Spero, Head of Americas Mobile Advertising on the future of mobile and mobile marketing. To learn more about the event and live stream, please visit the Google Mobile Ads blog.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Priority Inbox in Gmail for mobile

If you’ve ever cursed a phone’s tiny screen as utterly inadequate for sifting through an overflowing inbox you’ll be pleased to hear that the Gmail mobile web app now supports Priority Inbox. Priority Inbox helps combat information overload by automatically identifying your important messages so you can focus on those first. Until today it was only available on the desktop and on Android devices.

Now, once you set up Priority Inbox in the desktop version of Gmail, you’ll see Priority Inbox sections when you visit gmail.com from your phone’s browser and click on the ‘Menu’ screen. You’ll also see importance markers in your inbox, so you can quickly identify which messages are important.



This feature is available for most mobile browsers that support HTML5, such as devices running Android 1.5+ and iOS 3+. Currently, you can’t set up Priority Inbox or mark messages as important or unimportant from here. If you have suggestions or want to learn more, visit our Help Center and forum.

Posted by Nathan Bullock, Software Engineer

Introducing the Android Market website

Over the past two years, developers around the world have helped make Android Market the go-to place for more than 100,000 apps, games and widgets. Previously, you could only access Android Market directly from your device, but today, we are introducing the Android Market website that lets you browse and search for great apps right from your web browser.

The website makes it easy to discover great new apps with a bigger, brighter interface. You can also send apps directly to your Android device with just a few clicks—no wires needed. We’ve built in new social features, too. You can share apps with your friends through Twitter. And you can read and post app reviews directly to Android Market from the web or from your device.

And what about all those apps you’ve already purchased and downloaded? Sign in to the website with your Google account and click “My Market Account” to see all the apps you’ve purchased or downloaded. It makes managing all your apps quite easy.

The Android Market website was officially unveiled today during an event at Google headquarters where we showcased Honeycomb (Android 3.0), our latest Android release built from the ground up for tablets. Honeycomb has a completely redesigned user interface, with more interactive notifications and widgets, improved multi-tasking, and the latest and greatest Google Mobile services optimized for tablets. We also showed off pre-release applications optimized for Honeycomb, from over 17 developers including:

• AccuWeather
• CNN
• Disney Mobile
• The Economist
• Fuze box
• Glu Mobile
• Google Body
• Grocery iQ
• Intuit
• Ngmoco
• Pulse News
• Quickoffice
• Time Magazine
• TouchType
• Trendy Entertainment
• War Drum Studios
• Weatherbug
• Zynga

Stay tuned for more at Mobile World Congress (February 14) in Barcelona where you'll see more than 50 developers demoing their latest phone and tablet apps at the Android booth in Hall 8.

Posted by Eric Chu, Mobile Platforms Program Manager

Update (5:20PM): Full video from the event earlier is now available. Check it out!

Announcing Google Shopper for iPhone

(Cross-posted on the Google Merchant Blog)

As we announced last November, millions of people have downloaded Google Shopper for Android to help them shop on the go. Today, we’re excited to let you know that Google Shopper, our popular Android shopping application, is now available for iPhone as a download in the App Store. Google Shopper turns your iPhone into a shopping assistant, so you can:

• Learn more about products and read relevant user reviews
• Compare prices at online and local stores
• Save and share products for later consideration

Let’s say you’re planning a special meal for Valentine’s Day - but you need a cast-iron skillet to get the recipe just right. With Shopper, finding one is easy enough: just type in “cast iron skillet” or say it using Voice Search. Then, from the results, you can choose a specific product that appeals to you. Alternatively, if you were in the store and wanted to see product reviews, you could also scan the barcode of a particular product.

Once you’ve selected a product result, you can compare prices across web retailers, and even find where you can purchase the item nearby, which is especially useful for those of us who are last-minute shoppers. For some retailers, we also provide inventory information so you can see if a particular store branch has the item in stock, has limited availability, or if the item is out of stock and you should head to a different store.

If you’re not sure about making a purchase or are building out a gift list, you can “star” products for future consideration. You can also share items with friends across your social network to let them know about products you love or great deals you've found.

You can download Google Shopper for free in the App Store. Shopper is available for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 with iOS 4.0+ in English only for the United States and the UK.

We hope you enjoy shopping with Google Shopper!

Posted by Richard Hung, Senior Product Manager, Google Shopper

Check in with Google Latitude

(Cross-posted with the Official Google Blog)

We first introduced Google Latitude to help you stay in touch with your friends and family by making it easy to share where you are. For the 10 million people actively using Latitude each month, this “where” has been a location on a map. Starting today in Google Maps 5.1 for Android, you can also connect that location to a real place by checking in there using Latitude.

Connecting your location with places
You can still use Latitude to automatically update and share your location, but check-ins let you add context to the location—like captions to a photo. For example, I live in San Francisco but often travel around the world. Until today, sharing my location let friends and family know if I was across the globe or in their neighborhood. Now, check-ins let them see the cool restaurant I’m trying in Taipei or join me for a latte at the cafe nearby.

See where your friends are on a map and where they’re checking in.

Not your typical check-ins
Because you can use Latitude to automatically detect your location, we’ve added a few twists to checking in to make it really easy:

• Notifications: Turn on check-in notifications in Latitude’s settings and get a notification to check in at a nearby place once you arrive. Never forget to check in again.
• Automatic check-ins: Choose to automatically check in at specific places you designate, and you’ll be checked in when you’re there. You can talk to friends or finish your bagel without fumbling with your phone.
• Check out: Once you leave, Latitude knows to automatically check you out of places so friends aren’t left guessing if you’re still there.

Explore your world one check-in at a time
Latitude is built right into Google Maps for Android so check-ins work across Latitude and Maps seamlessly. For example, check in at that new hamburger joint, and you’ll see its Place page with reviews to help you order. When friends check in at a place, you can go straight from their Latitude profile to its Place page to learn about it, fire up Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for turn-by-turn directions to them, and more.

You can also check in at a favorite place to earn special status there; you’ll see if you’ve become a “Regular,” a “VIP” or a “Guru” on its Place page. Keep checking in to hold onto your status or reach the next level.

Latitude check-ins are built right into Google Maps and Place pages.

Of course, we thought carefully about how to make checking in to places quick and easy while giving you control over your privacy. Just like when sharing your location with Latitude, checking in is 100% opt-in, and you can choose to share any check-in with your friends on Latitude, publicly on the web and your Google profile, or just yourself. Learn more about checking in and managing your check-ins with Latitude in the Help Center. Coming later this week, you’ll also be able to see your complete history of check-ins using the optional History tab at google.com/latitude from your computer.

Update (2/11/2011): You can now see check-ins and your own check-in history at google.com/latitude from your computer.

Choose options for individual check-ins or turn on and off notifications in the Latitude settings.

Start checking in by downloading the latest Google Maps from Android Market (on Android 1.6+; tap here if you're on your phone) and then joining Latitude from the main menu. You can check in everywhere Maps and Latitude are already available. If you’re using the new Latitude app for iPhone, you’ll see your friends’ check-ins, and we’ll update the app soon so you can check in too.

Just the beginning...
Checking in from Latitude is just one step in helping you connect the places you go with the people you care about. We believe in letting you use or share your location however you like, and we’re working on making location and check-ins useful in more places—across Google and the web.

Posted by Joe LaPenna, Software Engineer, Google Latitude Team