According to Andrew Fogg from kusiri, Google will start rolling out offline support for both Gmail and Google Calendar through Google Gears within the next six weeks. Google enabled offline access to Google Docs earlier this year, after they had already been using if for Google Reader for over a year. Fogg also found out that Google will start supporting SyncML for synchronizing contacts in Gmail around the same time.
As Google is trying to push more of its products into small businesses and enterprises, having offline access to email and calendar functions is becoming an absolute necessity for Google. Even as mobile Internet access is becoming more ubiquitous every day, few business users would want to risk being caught in a situation where they don't have access to their email or calendaring clients.
Some of Google's competitors such as Zimbra or Zoho are already offering some of these capabilities based on Google Gears. MySpace, too, is working on making its messaging platform available offline using Gears.
As Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog observes, Google's support for SyncML is also noteworthy. SyncML is an open standard for synchronizing information between different devices and, so far, has mostly been adopted by the mobile phone industry, with all the major companies such as Motorola, Nokia, Sony, LG, as well as IBM and Siemens supporting it in at least some of their products.
The latest version of SyncML has added support for push email. According to Andrew Fogg, Google is using SyncML for synchronizing its contacts database with the iPhone, but in the long run, it is probably worth speculating if Google might also start pushing email to the iPhone (or any other phone for that matter), using the SyncML push technology.
