All other smartphone users are left out

Nov 19, 2009 18:41 GMT  ·  By

Google doesn't really like big product and feature launches. It's about to have one very, very soon as it unleashes Google Chrome OS into the world, but for the most part its products and services evolve slowly with small but regular updates. Sometimes though, these small features may be a lot more important than they would appear at first glance. Take today's announcement of a very small feature available now in Gmail labs notifying users that their chat buddies are currently connected using Android-powered devices.

“Gmail chat status (those green, orange, and red bubbles) indicates if your friends are online or not. But sometimes my buddies appear green when they're not really "online online" — they just have chat open on their Android phones. Turn on Green Robot, a new experiment in Gmail Labs, and you'll see a robot icon next to people who are currently using Android phones,” Chad Yoshikawa, a Google software engineer, wrote.

Moreover, Google has a perfectly legitimate example of why the feature is useful: “when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages.” The idea makes perfect sense, typing on most mobile devices is not exactly fun and the small feature can make a lot of difference in certain circumstances. The feature is easy to install, just like any Gmail Labs experiment, all you have to do is go to the Settings page under the Labs tab and enable it.

The interesting thing about this though, as TechCrunch also noticed, is that the feature is only available for Android devices. Presumably, if Google had really wanted to make it easier for users to know when their friends were mobile, it would have enabled a similar feature for all smartphones, Blackberries, Palms, and even iPhones, and it wouldn't have used Android's robot icon. This in itself isn't a big deal, the feature is too small to have any sort of significance, but it does make you wonder just what else could Google eventually do to favor its own products and services which are covering more and more markets.

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