Amidst all the well-deserved hullabaloo over 
last week’s big Google+ release (Who isn’t salivating?), Google began making some tweaks to their mobile web user interface (UI).
It seems that Google didn’t make any announcement about the upgrade, instead leaving users to find the changes on their own. Well, the heck with that. Here at Techcitement, we geek out over things like this!
With that in mind, here’s new UI that Google’s cooked up for us. These screencaps are from my Android phone, but I’d imagine the UI is uniform across the mobile phone spectrum.
The first thing I noticed is that the old-school text links for different search types are gone. Google has moved the links to the top of the page and displayed them in a recognizably Chrome-esque style. Tap the more tab and a short lineup of icons appears at the top. You can also find this lineup by simply dragging the page down, which is a nice and intuitive touch.
Behind Google Mobile's slightly tweaked main page (left) lies a surprise upgrade (right).
(Those blue icons at the bottom made their first appearance a few weeks ago. They lead directly to the Places tab, a surprisingly helpful feature when you’re on the road.)
These four search types are usually enough for casual use, but of course Google didn’t let it go at that. Tap the new extended more link to reveal a grid of icons giving you access to twelve kinds of directed searches (below left). Notice that this includes an app search section, giving you a new way to search the Android Market right from your mobile browser.
Not enough? Tap the Apps heading to reveal another twelve icons, this time to a variety of Google applications, including the aforementioned Google+, Gmail, Translate, Youtube, and even Google Docs.
Tap 'more' a second time to reveal two menus of Google products.
That big white space at the top? At first I thought it was reserved for ads, but when Google+ users are signed in, that space is filled with your user image, name, and email address.
Signing in also adds a Notifications button alongside Search and Apps, which provides a handy Google+ notification count. When tapped, the most recent notifications are listed. Finally, Google+ users see a Google+ icon in the Apps menu instead of a Google Buzz icon.
With this remarkable mobile upgrade, Google nudges users to take advantage of their mobile product interfaces rather than standalone apps. While that seems an odd fit to an Android user (we do love our apps), it makes perfect sense for the market in general.
Now iPhone and Palm users have easy, direct access to a wider variety of Google products without the company putting time and energy into creating an app for each platform.
More importantly, Google won’t have to hope users will find and bookmark their various mobile web applications. Instead, they’ve done the work and built an easy-to-find shortcut into the Google homepage, giving mobile users one more reason to make Google their mobile starting point every day.
I hadn’t noticed the Google+ features yet. That’s excellent.