The New York Times has a piece (login required): Google Sees Surge in iPhone Traffic.

It starts off talking about the title itself:

On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data made available to The New York Times. A few days later, iPhone traffic to Google fell below that of devices powered by the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system but remained higher than traffic from any other type of cellphone.

The data is striking because the iPhone, an Apple product, accounts for just 2 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to IDC, a market research firm. Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.

But, then you get to the important piece from a developer perspective:

“Consumers are going to demand Internet browsers” as good as Apple’s, said Vic Gundotra, a Google vice president who oversees mobile products.

Mr. Gundotra said Web browsers as capable as the iPhone’s could also prove a boon for developers of mobile software, who have long struggled to adapt their programs to different types of phones. As it does on the PC, he said, the browser could provide a more homogeneous “layer” for programmers.

“The reason no one considered this seriously is that the Web layer on mobile devices was terrible,” he said. Google has taken advantage of the capabilities of the iPhone browser to create a product, internally called Grand Prix, that it says provides easy access to many of the company’s services, including search, Gmail, Reader and Picasa.

Google, which developed the first version of Grand Prix in six weeks, is introducing a new version on Monday, just six weeks after the first one. That is a speed of development not previously possible on mobile phones, he said.

2008. The year that developers swarm onto mobile phones through the Web floodgates.

Over on the Google Developer Podcast we have released a new episode where we chat with Dianne Hackborn and Jason Parks of Android.

As always, it is always nice to hear real people talk about technology, and this is a great example. You get to hear about their past at Be and PalmSource, and how it has affected their work on Android. You really get a feel for how this is a next generation platform based on the experience of people who have done this before, on many platforms (e.g. from Windows Mobile, to Danger, to Palm).

What will you learn on this podcast?

• Some history behind the project
• The high level architecture of Android. For example, how Linux processes handle the VM and manage security (the VM doesn’t handle it)
• Details on the Dalvik VM and how it is optimized for small devices
• The architecture: From Intents to Views to Permissions and more
• How XML is slow, but the tools convert the XML to a nicer format for you
• The tooling and steps for building an application on Android
• How so many objects have a URL, and how the environment is like a mini-SOA (Services across processes instead of across the network)
• Thoughts on how you program for small devices, and things to watch out for if you move from the desktop
• The control, or lack of control that you have over the application lifecycle
• “Everything you do drains the battery”
• The thread story: they exist, you don’t have to deal with them if you don’t want too, and the UI
• Using XMPP for messaging

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

If you have gone to google.com on your iPhone recently you have seen a different interface. The iPhone specific site has been optimized for speed and fluidity. When we first got to see this work internally at Google we were all impressed at how Steve Kanefsky was able to make it seem so fast and smooth thanks to lots of caching and smart Ajax work. In fact, the searching itself uses APIs that you can use yourself, the Ajax Search APIs.

This interface is more than just search. Just as the Facebook application is so good due to the fact that Joe tried hard to think about what you would want to do on the phone interface (get info quickly versus browsing around FB endlessly), the same happens here. Core actions across Google are available. A quick look at your email, your calendar, your feeds, and much more.

Here is what Steve said about the project:

We all know that using the web on mobile phones can be a challenge sometimes. Compared to our personal computers, the screens are smaller, it’s more difficult to navigate and enter text, the network connections are slower, and the browsers lack many of the features we’ve become accustomed to. I deal with this every day as both a developer and a user of mobile web applications. So you can imagine how excited I was when the iPhone launched with a large touch screen, Wi-Fi, and a full-blown Safari web browser!

I started thinking about how to use AJAX technology to improve Google on the iPhone. I set out to create an application that would preload my favorite Google products and allow me to switch between them instantly. I wanted web results as well as image, local, and news results without having to repeat my search. I wanted to check Gmail and my news feeds in Google Reader without having to load a new page every time. I also wanted Google Suggest to save me time typing queries on the virtual keyboard.

I created a prototype and showed it to some fellow Googlers. After that, things started moving pretty quickly. A few weeks (and a few gallons of mint tea) later, I had an improved version which Googlers throughout the company were using on their iPhones (it works great on the iPod Touch too). Now we want to share it with everyone.

The new Google Maps with My Location product is an update to Google Maps for Mobile that has location information even if you don’t have GPS.

It uses information from cell towers a la Navizon on the iPhone.

As for privacy:

This approximation is anonymous, as Google does not gather any personally identifiable information or associate any location data with personally identifiable information as part of the My Location feature. The feature can also be easily disabled by anyone who prefers not to use it.

And more info:

If you have a GPS-enabled device, this blue dot corresponds to your GPS location. At times, or if you do not have a GPS-enabled phone, you might see the blue dot surrounded by a light blue circle (as shown on the right) to indicate uncertainty about your location.

Why the uncertainty? The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map - it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average). We’re still in beta, but we’re excited to launch this feature and are constantly working to improve our coverage and accuracy.

The My Location feature is available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices.

Just press “0″.