Google has recently decided to get rid of its iPhone-optimized, single-column based site for iGoogle. iGoogle is their widget-based ‘your customized Google’ site which let you see the RSS feeds you want, your local weather, Gmail and pretty much whatever else you want as a personal home page option.

As Erica Sadun at Infinite Loop reports

Last week, Google started redirecting iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page (www.google.com/m/ig) with its more limited feature set, rather than the iPhone-optimized version (www.google.com/ig/i).

And apparently a lot of iPhone iGoogle users are *not* happy campers

Forum participant howiedeano summed up the frustration. “I think the problem I and many people have is that the standard mobile version of iGoogle is rubbish on a touchscreen 3G device designed for the internet,” he posted. “It works fine for a basic mobile phone for people who use the internet once a year…[T]he custom version of iGoogle was great & worked perfectly, we don’t want it to change…”

I only very occasionally use my iGoogle page (and haven’t updated it in forever), so I can’t say I’ll be deeply affected by Google’s change – but it does worry me a little, and I hope it is not the beginning of any sort of trend for Google (or others’) pages on the iPhone. And a couple of quotes from Google in the Infinite Loop post do not sound good to me:

According to a Google engineer who posted to that thread, Google made this decision in order to unify the mobile iGoogle experience. “We’ve decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We’ve found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones — we want to ensure you’ll all see the same version,” he wrote. In addition, a Google spokesman told Ars, “In an effort to make our iGoogle mobile experience more consistent, we’re no longer supporting a special version of iGoogle for the iPhone. Those who currently use iGoogle for the iPhone will be directed to the main mobile version of iGoogle.”

Though I’m not a big iGoogle user (on iPhone or desktop), I am a huge user of Google Reader, and use its iPhone pages very heavily. I would HATE to see those knocked back to just a standard ‘mobile’ version – as the iPhone optimized pages are superb to work with.

In fact I generally hate the idea of seeing Google’s pages for the iPhone revamped to cater for the lowest class of phones they’ll be viewed on. As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m a big fan of iPhone optimized sites, and find it depressing to think about being hit with ‘mobile’ pages for any of the iPhone sites I use frequently.

How about you all? What do you think of the iGoogle changes, and any possible trend in this direction ?

Via: Infinite Loop

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