The Google Talk page www.google.com/talk will now load a web version of Google Talk when viewed on the iPhone. On a normal browser, this is the page that you would go to and install Google Talk or use the Talk gadget. With next weeks 3G iPhone launch, App store launch and 2.0 software update, it will be interesting to see if there is also a Google Talk stand alone application available in the iPhone App Store. AOL seems to be the only company that has announced a standalone AIM application for the iPhone.

iPhone informational page:
http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/talk/

Blog post:
http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/06/chat-on-your-iphone.html

Looks pretty cool!

I'm guessing Google will probably hold off until July 11th to announce or release anything.

Martin: I would imagine they would wait till that date.

I hope they'll make one for the N95 as well..

Martin & Colin:
Why?
What's so special about this date?

David:

That date (July 11) is when Apple releases the next version of the iPhone, a new software firmware for all iPhones which brings them to 2.0 version. With the new version, comes a way of loading 3rd party applications through an iPhone app store. Which is how all iPhone versions can get new applications to run on them.

What's with all the iPhone specific web apps? Any reason why this shouldn't work on my Nokia N82, which also has a WebKit based browser?

I have to imagine its triggered by the user agent of the Mobile Safari browser.

iPhone user agent:
HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C25 Safari/419.3

<< Any reason why this shouldn't work on my Nokia N82, which also has a WebKit based browser? >>

From my experience with my Nokia N73 (which I think has the same browser as the N82, although I could be wrong) the browser – although WebKit-based – is completely crippled compared to Safari, so that could be why.

Ok, so I tried faking my user agent in my browser to see if I could see the iPhone specific chat page. But no luck there. I did try the www.google.com/talk/ link on my iPhone and it actually redirects to the link below:
http:// talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/m

This link should load for other phones as I could load it in my Firefox 3 browser on my laptop. The buttons don't look exactly like they should though in a normal browser.

Here is what the homepage icon looks like on the iPhone:
http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/images/iphone/favicon.png

about time, looks great... I wish the iphone would have some local based chat but I guess if they wanted it there it would have been there. Why didn't they just include ichat with the phone's standard app package

Very nice! I'm afraid to close my browser though.

This needs to be a real app for the iphone, not a web app.

It seems like Google is behind the times here. This web app should have been available months ago. I don't see why they wasted their time writing this web app a week before 3rd party applications will be available for the iPhone. In my opinion, they should have been working on a native application that will be able to take advantage of Apple's "Push Notification Service" so that users will be able to do other things with the phone while still being connected.

Nick
Google maintains about 4.2 quintillion versions of Google Talk. It is THE LAW. Never upgrade an existing version when you can rewrite!

Okay, but seriously? Writing a SECURE and RELIABLE web application takes time, even for Google (which is most of what they DO). Yes, all of Talk's infrastructure is (probably) clean and consolidated, but clients are hard. Even Webkit is a moving target, as there are different versions customized by different companies (Apple's Safari vs. Nokia vs. Google Android). Apple's push notification service is not widely available just yet, and companies aren't completely sure how much to trust Apple with their data. Strongly encrypting data and using Apple's servers as a dumb relay can make this a non issue, but it's more WORK.

Remember that every Google iPhone app is just practice for Android apps as well. Also remember that desktop Google Talk now has embedded Webkit (I totally called this), which means that Google DOES NOT WANT to build Google Talk as a standalone application and possibly NEVER DID. If Safari iPhone can save and run web as quickly as native iphone apps, then Google's problem is solved.

Oh no, Google Talk news makes me all ranty.