One of our readers, Jesse, had sent an email late last week to inform us that Google has dumped the optimized version of iGoogle for the iPhone and is redirecting users to a standard mobile version instead.
So if you type www.igoogle.com in your iPhone Safari's address bar, you will now be taken to standard mobile version of iGoogle at www.google.com/m/ig instead of the iPhone version at www.google.com/ig/i. If you try to go to the iPhone version directly, you will get redirected to the mobile version of iGoogle.
This hasn't gone too well with iPhone users who used to love the iPhone version of iGoogle.
You can checkout the screenshot below to understand the difference between the optimized version of iGoogle for the iPhone and mobile version of iGoogle. As you can see information in the iPhone version is better laid out and easier to navigate then the standard mobile version. The other issue is that some of the contents does not show up in the mobile version which used to load in the iPhone version, as the content isn't compatible with the mobile version.
But as you can see from this Google Discussion thread, the decision to dump the optimized version of iGoogle for the iPhone has irked quite a few iPhone users.
Paul has also provided the following clarification about the situation.
Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren't compatible with most mobile browsers.
We've got several articles in our Help Center about the mobile experience on iGoogle, which you can find in our Help Center (linked below).
However, that didn't stop the comments from folks who really liked the iPhone version. Paul later added:
Christina over at DownloadSquad also did some investigation concluded:
But she found something strange. It looks like the Gmail widget does not work on the iPhone or the BlackBerry but works on T-Mobile's Android smartphone - G1. I tried to load the Gmail gadget on my iPhone 3G and it did not load though it was visible in the desktop version.
Jesse asked us the following question:
Its possible but in the current environment we believe the reason for dropping the iPhone version of iGoogle and to redirect users to a standard mobile version was probably to reduce overheads (read costs) of maintaining various versions of iGoogle. As you might already know, Google has been taking a long, hard look at all the things they are doing to ensure they are investing resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners. Google recently announced the shutdown of many experimental products that weren’t really generating any revenue such as Notebook, Dodgeball, Catalog Search, and Jaiku.
But lets hope Google takes notice of the feedback they have received from users who loved the iPhone version of iGoogle and rolls back its decision or at least makes the standard mobile version as good as the iPhone version.
We will keep you posted if there are any further updates on this topic here at iPhone Hacks, so stay tuned.
What do you think? Are you missing the iPhone version of iGoogle? Tell us in the comments.
Thanks Jesse for the heads up!
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Google should go forward .. not backward!!!
give me back my old igoogle on my iphone i dammit!!!
Yep but now they're in competition with iPhone so why should they really.