It looks like Google is bringing its Instant Preview feature to the mobile platforms, as we’ve seen this on the iPhone Safari browser and the Android Webkit browser.
If you don’t know, Google Instant Preview is the online service which gives you a quick look at the links you’re about to click on when you do a search. On the desktop, it works when you hover your mouse over the link and a window or sorts pops up to give you a preview of what type of site that link will take you to.
On the mobile version on Android and iPhone, Google Instant Preview works like this: you do a search in browser, the results come up and when you tap on the text underneath the link results, you’re then thrown into a slide-show like interface which previews which pages the links go to.
Our own Blake was using some Android 2.3 Gingerbread ROMs and he found that feature in the browser too. He said it gives you a page similar to the revamped Google Images mobile site. He’s not quite sure how often he’d used it but he said it’s implemented well.
I don’t know how much extra bandwidth Google Instant Preview will cause but I’m thinking it won’t be too much. Still, one has to wonder if this could have any impact on a world where tiered data services are becoming the norm.
For example, new AT&T iPhone users may now only have 200 MB per month, so every little bit of data counts. Is this new feature from Google worth the extra data or does it require such a low amount that it doesn’t matter?
Either way, it should be going live in iPhone Safari browsers and Android Gingerbread browsers right now, so check it out and let us know what you think in the comments.
[Via Tuaw]