Setting up services for your mobile phone often requires you to perform some configurations via the Web.

This is true for a number of Google services, and apparently people didn’t think it was easy enough.

Google listened to all the feedback and launched a new mobile site today to help make it easier to set your phone up with Google services.

Man, did Google dumb its mobile Web site down. It is so easy to get started, there’s no reason you won’t have your Google services configured in no time.

Going to http://mobile.google.com brings up a landing page. On that page is a list of the major phone manufacturers, along with pictures that resemble those manufacturers’ devices.

Select the choice that most closely resembles your phone, and it whisks you to a page customized for your type of device.

This next page lists all the services that your phone (or platform) supports.

For example, here is the page for BlackBerrys. It has a tool so you can send a link via SMS to your phone that leads directly to Google’s mobile services.

Simply enter your phone number and the link will appear in a few moments. You can also just type m.google.com directly into your phone’s browser.

Additionally, there’s a help center and explanations for everything. Not that it was difficult before, but now it is really easy.

So if you’re a Google user and haven’t set up Google services on your phone because you thought it would be a pain, take heart. What are you waiting for? Get started!

Starting today in the U.S., users of BlackBerry smartphones should begin noticing a number of improvements to their Google search results. Google has tailored its software to better accommodate the BlackBerry Web browser.

Google has been on a roll lately with customized phone support. It goes to greater and greater lengths to make sure each mobile phone platform has what it needs to view and use Google’s mobile services better.

Google has, for example, rolled out some seriously customized versions of its services for the iPhone, which has different usability characteristics than many other phones.

Now, Google has turned its attention to BlackBerry users, specifically the browser.

The Official Google Mobile Blog spells out what it has done:

1. Improved comprehensiveness: Our mobile search now incorporates results from Product Search, Blog Search, News archives search, and more.
2. Blended results: Instead of showing you web, image, local and news results in separate sections, we now combine them to improve relevance. We’ve also made it easier for you to focus your search on any one of these categories — notice how the links are now placed at the top of the results page.
3. Longer snippets: Web results include longer snippets so that your answer may be right on the results page.
4. Related searches: At the bottom of the search results page, you’ll find a list of related searches to help you refine a query.

According to Google, these changes reflect its desktop search results pages. I was not able to test the new enhancements on my BlackBerry to confirm that.

Feel free to check it out for yourself and share your experience in the comments below.

You may also watch a video demonstration here.

Wow. That’s all I can say right now. It’s been about nine months since Mozilla promised to “rock the mobile Web” with its forthcoming mobile version of the Firefox browser.

If the final product bears even the slightest resemblance to the browser demonstrated in this video, every other mobile browser out there has a lot to worry about.

Aza Raskin, head of user experience over at Mozilla Labs, posted a video demonstration on a potential candidate for Firefox Mobile.

He also writes in detail some nice explanations on why Mozilla has taken this direction with mobile Firefox.

The browser seen in this demo is not a final release candidate, but it should be:

Based on using a touchscreen device, Mozilla has solved all the navigational pains associated with mobile browsing by using simple panning gestures.

Need to access the control buttons or URL bar? Pan in any direction. Most of the time, 100% of the phone’s pixels are being used to display content, not navigational controls. You only see the nav controls when you want to.

Secondly, it uses a zoom effect to control tabs. You can zoom way in and out, and set up groupings of tabs in clusters of associated content, such as communications Web sites, and so on.

Being able to cluster tabs like this is just plain cool. Because the display is a 2-D plane, you can arrange the tabs and documents in any way that you want.

I can’t wait for this to be released. Again. Wow. Lots of wow.

Google provides so many services for free, I am rather surprised that it doesn’t offer a free FTP hosting service for small business customers.

Sure, Docs, Apps, and even GMail and Picasa can serve as repositories of files, but they aren’t super convenient for transferring large files back and forth. Will there ever be a Google FTP?

Most FTP services aren’t that expensive. You can get storage for up to 10 GB for less than $10.00 USD or $20.00 USD per month, depending on where you have your FTP site hosted. That’s not a colossal expense for any business.

Small businesses, however, suffer more from the nickel-and-dime effect, and that $10.00 USD can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

On top of that, not all FTPs are created equal. Some have limits on the amount of data that can be transferred back and forth, charging you more when you go over the limit.

To be fair, Google is very generous with storage in its Gmail accounts. I currently have access to 6.8 GB of storage in my e-mail, and can retrieve anything I’ve sent/received at any time, from nearly any platform.

Google’s photo-sharing service, Picasa, grants you 1 GB of storage. Not bad.

Docs limits file uploads to 500 Kb for HTML, .doc and .rtf files. Spreadsheets can’t be larger than 1 MB, and Presentations can’t surpass 10 MB if uploaded from a PC, 2 MB if transferred from the Web, or just 500 Kb via e-mail.

It’s not uncommon for me to have to send a large batch of picture files, or a video file, here or there. Sending pictures one by one is a major pain in the rear. I often pack them into a single folder and then zip the file but even zipped, the folders can still be bulky.

Most e-mail systems, even Gmail, can’t really handle 30 MB attachments all that well, necessitating the need for FTP to transfer the bigger files/folders.

So, Google, just out of curiosity, why don’t you offer an FTP service for small business? Afraid it will be used to transfer copyrighted material such as movies and/or music?

Have the MPAA and RIAA already squashed any ideas you might have had? What’s the deal? Am I stuck finding some anonymous storage facility?

Just last week it looked like RIM was ready to had over its Blackberry message encryption to the Indian authorities. Now, it seems as if, to quote singer/songwriter Tom Petty, RIM has had a Change of Heart.

From the chorus:

There’s been a change, Yeah there’s been a change of heart, Said there’s been a change, You push just a little too far, You make it just a little too hard, There’s been a change of heart

That’s a change from last week, when it was reported that RIM would hand over the crypto keys for its “non-business enterprise customers.”

According to a RIM statement, its encryption architecture doesn’t allow for anyone, not even RIM itself, to break open ciphered messages.

“The Blackberry security architecture for enterprise customers is purposefully designed to exclude the capability for Research in Motion or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances,”

Source: Indian Express Newspaper

If this is true, and I really hope it is, there is no way RIM can fulfill the Indian government’s request for the keys so they’d be able to read messages for certain investigations. Though, I’m quite confident, the government will find a way.

If they don’t, let’s see if the government ups the ante to a “don’t come around here no more” threat to RIM.

If you’ve dreamed of starting your own Web site, Google has made it easier than ever. It has expanded the availability of its Google Sites service — originally only for Google Apps users — to everyone. There’s no limit on the number of pages you can create, nor what you can share with the WWW.

When Google first made sites available to Apps users, I took it for a spin. It was fairly easy to register a site and use Google’s tools to crease some basic Web pages. No advanced knowledge of HTML or other Web technologies is required.

I also was able to set up user accounts, e-mail accounts, and make it really official. At the time, it was only for registered businesses with Google Apps accounts. Now every Jane and Joe can have at it.

Google writes in its blog:

“We’ve made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information — team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it — in one place, for a few people, a group or the world.”

Sites isn’t just for one person to set up and manage a Web site. It’s a collaborative tool that lets anyone (who you’ve invited) view or edit content. Setting up access for others is as simple as e-mailing them.

In the spirit of Web 2.0, the ability for many to contribute, change, and collectively alter Web documents can be truly powerful … or utterly annoying. Either way, launching your own Web site just got a little bit simpler.