Todays post is a 2009 midyear round up of the status of the Google Mobile applications: Latitude, Voice, Docs, Mail, Maps and Reader. My focus is on the iPhone mobile platform. Google Latitude Google Latitude is their location and status message product. The application up until now has been available on other phone platforms such as Android, but lacking on iPhone. In the mean time, iPhone users have had to look elsewhere.

Logging into Gmail today and I note: You are currently using 885 MB (12%) of your 7005 MB. 7GB is a massive amount of email to offer for free, and it is only the next point in their ever growing offering. In comparison, Windows live (aka hotmail) currently offers 5GB when you login into their product. The counter on the gmail login page shows Over 7005.197177 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.

Only 2 months ago I wrote that Gmail had hit 4GB, but it was still behind the main crowd (MSN, Yahoo, etc). Well in time for the new year, they have finally hit the 6GB (not 6GiB yet!) limit. This was initially picked up by a number of bloggers including WikiGiz and BBCentral. I’ve totally cutover to Gmail since they enabled IMAP and I figured out how to turn it on.

Recently Gmail activated IMAP for selected accounts, and I appeared to not be one of them. However was it really for selected accounts or was it for ‘selected languages’?! Reading about gmail on digg led me to an un-dug comment (I gave him a thumbs up!) saying that for IMAP to appear your language in gmail had to be set to ‘English (US)’. So I gave it a try, as I had mine on ‘English (UK)’ for the spelling.

With my recent loss, I had thought about, and seen other people, decentralising data. Luckily I’ve already got an email and RSS feed backup in place. As soon as my Laptop was out of order, I jumped onto my pobox.com account and redirected email to Gmail. Gmail will keep my mail flow going for a week or two. Next I went over to Google reader and reset all my feeds. Previously I had exported all my subscribed Newsfire RSS subscriptions to OPML format, and imported it into google reader.

According to the Download Squad Google’s Gmail has just integrated IMAP. This in conjunction with the recent storage space is the second big thing for google in the mail arena in recent days. I applaud them for this move as the POP3 access they previously offered was great for desktop PC’s but difficult for mobile devices. I can confirm that it appears to be only in select accounts, because as of now, I still only have POP access.

I was logged into Gmail today and noticed it states You are currently using 92 MB (2%) of your 4044 MB. This is close to a doubling of the email capacity for normal accounts. I’m not sure if this applies to all users, or gets applied progressively, but it is a fantastic number to see at the bottom of your inbox. In comparison, Windows live (aka hotmail) offers 1GB to their users, albeit in the form of a “Skydrive“.