Google Mobile Services Updated For The iPad

Google wanted in on the iPad craze and they have just announced a complete compatibility and a new layout for their Services on the iPad. Gmail, will now appear in a two column layout and uses all HTML5 which ensures a seamless, clean display. Other services include YouTube – which works with iPad sans issues – and the Google Mobile App. The Google Mobile App has been made bigger to accommodate the iPad’s larger screen. Even if enmity still flows between Google/Apple it’s nice to see Google’s developers hold no grudge against their tablet-toting counterparts.

You can, trick Gmail into thinking you're on an iPad with some tweaking. All you need to do is change the browser's user agent, which can be made possible with just a small amount of effort on some browsers. Here's how to do it in three of them (in order of easiest, to most difficult.)

Safari:

(Mac + PC) This works on both platforms. Just go into Safari's "preferences" menu, click on the "advanced" tab. Go all the way to the bottom, and check the "show develop in menu bar". Close the menu, this will allow you to find a new "develop" option in the main menu. On the Mac this can be found as one of the options on the top of the screen. On the PC, it's a on the page-looking icon next to the Safari settings button on the top right of the screen. In either case, find the develop menu, then go to user agent, then pick "other." You will get a menu to type a custom user agent string. Just drop this (found at blog Digital Inspiration) in there: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10. Easy now you're done headead over to Gmail, log-in, and and that’s it

Firefox:

With Firefox, it's not that as easy to change user agents as it is in Safari. You will have to download an extension for it first. User Agent Switcher is the most popular one. And the good news, is that this add-on is good for many other things, like tricking certain sites into thinking you're on the browser they require. Once you've installed UAS, you'll find its options in the Tools menu at the top of your browser. A new option for "default user agent" will be there, go ahead and select that, then "edit user agents" in the sub-menu. Now you just have to opt to create a new user agent. Just clear out all the text boxes that are already filled out, then give it a name (like "iPad"), and drop the same user agent text that we used in Safari in the user agent box. When finished, User Agent Switcher should have already picked your new iPad setting as its default, meaning you're good to go. Just be sure to switch it back to the default for any other pages you're on.

Chrome:

Chrome is the hardest of the browsers to trick into thinking it's an iPad. For now, the Chameleon User Agent Spoofer extension does not work with the settings that was used for Safari and Firefox. Instead, you need to go into the guts of Chrome, and change the user agent settings with a hex code editor. It is a lot of work, but it can be done. Blog Labnol has a good how-to guide here. Just swap out the agent string at the end of step two with the same code we used for Safari and Firefox.

Android Users:

Users of the xScope browser on Android (QR download code on the right) might have noticed that an overnight update of the app added the iPad user agent option in the browser's built-in user agent switching. On Nexus One this kind of worked when holding the phone in landscape mode, though it was utterly useless when held in portrait mode. Still, this option was a whole lot easier than trying to tweak the user agent settings in any of the mentioned desktop browser, even if it's just as useless.