Are you sure that "Google Mobile" is the name of a site? There is an application of that name, and there are sites that let you download the app for iPhone, Blackberry, Android, WM etc., but apparently not for Maemo. What is the URL of the site you would like to access?

Are you looking for a low-bandwidth search page? There are two slightly different mobile versions of the Google search page, at http://www.google.com/wml and http://www.google.com/xhtml . Both of these load through the MicroB browser with wmlbrowser enabled. Making a search for "buffalo weather" using http://www.google.com/wml , there was a combined upload and download of 30.5 kB for the search page and the first page of results. (That included a four-day weather forecast.) This compares with 48 kB for the first page of results, using the Google desktop applet. The difference is not spectacular.

The web page you eventually select will require the same data transfer as it would if accessed directly (unlike the situation with a mobile phone browser, which receives a reduced download via Google's wml proxy). You could include the word "mobile" in your keywords, and then the search might return some mobile URL's. If you are lucky, those mobile pages will load on MicroB. No guarantee, though.

The mobile versions of google are available in the same national variants as the full-size search page. For example, if you are searching for web pages that are mainly of interest to people in Germany, you would use http://www.google.de/wml .


You are right in pointing out that many mobile sites either refuse to load or redirect you to the full-size site when they encounter the MicroB browser. Interestingly, this problem seems to be disappearing. Several mobile sites have been rewritten so that they do now load on MicroB, even though they did not in the past. A case in point is http://wap.ratp.fr/, the site I mentioned in an earlier post of this thread. It now works perfectly on MicroB, even without the wmlbrowser plugged in. This seems to be a side-effect of the iPhone hype, making site developers aware that there are intermediate devices whose users sometimes prefer to economise on bandwidth.

There is another helpful result of this increased awareness. More businesses and organizations are offering a full range of services on their mobile sites, which they did not in the past. Again, a site I mentioned previously is a good example. It is now possible to buy tickets and change reservations on the Italian train operator Trenitalia's mobile site. Until a few months ago, the mobile site could only be used for looking up timetables. This mobile site also loads on MicroB. (It always did, but now there is more reason to load it.)

The best solution would be an adaptation of Fennec for Maemo. This has been done, but apparently it does not work very well as yet.