#FF00AA

There it is: the updated Google application for the iPhone is available — you can ask iTunes or your iPhone to look for updates, or install it if you haven’t already. And it’s pretty much what you’d expect.

Voice recognition works pretty well, and it’s surprisingly fast (when it works; the application tends to hang for a bit when the servers don’t understand the query — maybe they ask the iPhone for more information then?), but it’s not very useful, and you can get results just as easily and quickly by using the keyboard. Particularly with Google offering type-ahead suggestions while you formulate your query, not to mention that keyboard-based searches return results from your address book (the Google app kinda sorta wants to be your iPhone’s Quicksilver) where as voice recognition only searches Google for now — which isn’t quite surprising, technically, but is a pity, because voice dialing is one of the most requested missing features on the iPhone. (The same day comes out “the only voice dialing application for iPhone that supports French language,” but it doesn’t have a free demo.)

Still, it’s a nice technical demo: the interface is clever, detecting automatically that you have the phone next to your ear and playing a sound so you know you can speak, and the data sent to Google’s servers is amazingly light (a couple hundred bytes — yes, bytes — as phoneme recognition is evidently handled by the application itself — so there shouldn’t be anything stopping them from adding voice dialing pretty soon). Interestingly, the system can differentiate same-sounding words by context (“bear market” vs. “bare ass” in Gizmodo’s classy example), which seems to indicate that Google isn’t recognizing words so much as comparing your vocal input to a database of all queries ever typed more than once, and how they’re supposed to sound. For better results, they’ll eventually have to tweak their search algorithms to handle homophones.

All in all, the most useful functionality remains geolocation (not sure whether it’s new to this version, or just a recent addition): if you type (or say) “pizza” or “sushi” you’ll get classic results plus a list of nearby restaurants. But the results aren’t as good (they don’t take distance into account as well) as those you can get by typing the same query into Apple’s Maps application — and voice recognition couldn’t understand “Starbucks.”

Which means that, if you can speak English with a vaguely American accent, you just owe it to yourself to install Google Mobile, and park it with those other applications you only keep on your phone to wow your iPhone-less friends.

Incidentally, that implementation of voice recognition that would be much more interesting on a Google/T-Mobile G1 phone, which doesn’t have a virtual keyboard and requires sliding the screen out and switching to landscape mode whenever you want to type anything. And, on the G1, voice recongition could be available directly from the home screen, and not restricted to a third-party modal application.

Did they think of having an API-accessible proximity sensor on the Android specification?