Google news and email launched to the UK mobile market

Mobile phone users in the UK will today be able to access the highly popular news aggregation, personalised homepages and email services offered by Google.

Google sees the large growth in the mobile phone market compared to the PC market as a threat to its dominance and has always been keen to strike up partnerships in this area. As mobile phones converge with the PC the role of Google can become even more ubiquitous in the future.

Deep Nishar, Google’s head of mobile products, said: “There are roughly twice the number of mobile devices in the world as there are PCs and the number of mobile devices is growing faster than PCs. In many emerging markets the only way that people are able to access the world’s information is through mobile phones.”

Mobile phone operators have been slow to realise that most users would prefer to use Google to read news and search the web than the custom interfaces that have been the norm on WAP phones to date. In future more people will be willing to use the Google services they are familiar with from years of internet use.

As long as the operators are making money from data transfer charges then they will be happy for Google to provide the content on their devices. Anything that increases the use of the mobile internet is good news for the mobile networks.

Google are confident that most phones less than a few years old will be able to access Google News, Gmail and the personalised Google homepage.

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