With an official announcement on the company’s blog, Google unveiled a few minutes ago a new version of Latitude for iPhone. Google Latitude, also available for Android devices, uses the iPhone’s GPS functionality to display your current location on a map and allows you to see what your friends are up to. The new 2.1 version, available here, lets you “check in” places and automatically be checked out if Latitude is set to update your location in the background. In this way, your friends will not only see your location, but know exactly what you’re doing – say drinking coffee at a nearby Starbucks. A huge Check In button in the app makes the process easy, and privacy settings let you share the check in with everyone, your friends only, or make it entirely private.

Tap the “Check in” button to start checking in at nearby places. Keep checking in every time you visit your favorite places to start gaining special status there. You’ll not only progress to become a Regular, VIP, and then Guru at your favorite places, but if you’re near Austin, Texas, gaining status lets you unlock check-in offers at over 60 places.

Just like with sharing your location, you can control your Latitude check-in privacy. Checking in is 100% opt-in, and you can choose to share any check-in with your friends on Latitude, publicly on the web and your Google profile, or just yourself.

With this update Google is clearly trying to create an alternative to popular check-in services like Facebook Places and Foursquare, which have become the de-facto standards for sharing your location and earn points or badges. We don’t know whether the new Google Latitude will take off or not, but you can check out the app here and tell us what you think. It’s a free download.

Remember the Google Mobile app for iPhone? With an official post on the company’s blog a few minutes ago, Google announced a major new version of the with a completely new look, new features and a new name: Google Search for iPhone. Simple as that, the app packs all the functionalities from the previous version in a new UI, easily accessible for everyone and built on top of iOS 4’s multitasking and fast app switching capabilities.

Google Search presents itself with a new search UI that makes it easy to start typing right away or perform a voice search through the iPhone’s mic. Search results can be tailored to your needs with a new toolbar that slides in and reveals more options as well as other Google applications.

Second, we’ve made it easier to pick up searching where you left off. If you leave the app and come back later, you’ll be able either to start a new search right away (just tap in the search box to type, hit the microphone button to do a voice search or tap on the camera icon to use Google Goggles) or get back to exactly where you were by tapping on the lower part of the page.

Finally, there are a number of improvements we’ve made to everything else you love in the app, including Google Goggles, Voice Search, Search with My Location, Gmail unread counts and more.

After launching the app for the first time, you’ll be guided through the new features of the app with an interactive overlay that places question marks on screen to explain what’s new and improved. Search, Goggles and Voice Search are still there, but placed next to the main search bar that is kept in a collapsible window you can open or dismiss at any time. The effect’s really cool as you can invoke search from anywhere in the app, even when browsing images or news results. A feeling I’ve got when trying the app is that Google is really trying to blend all its services together in this new Google Search app: with a single swipe, you can access Places, Images, Shopping search results, real-time updates, Blogs and more. It feels like they have rebuilt to app to unify all Google’s services in a single package, and I think that’s a step in the right direction. You can of course sign in with your Google Account and tweak the preferences to your needs.

Google Search for iPhone is a free download in the App Store. Check out the promo video and more screenshots below.

Read more

A few minutes ago Google announced the availability of Instant Previews for mobile devices, a new way to quickly preview the contents of a webpage by simply tapping with your finger on a magnifying glass icon next to search results. Instant Previews, perfectly compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch, allow you to flick through a series of thumbnails for a specific webpage like in the iOS photo app, without actually following the link in Mobile Safari.

As soon as you tap on a link from the visual preview gallery, Mobile Safari will open the webpage. Hit the back button, and you’re brought to the gallery again. The animations are very neat and fluid from what we can see now, and there’s even some kind of rubber-banding elastic effect when you scroll thumbnails. Sadly, there’s no support for Instant Previews in mobile Youtube videos – just webpages.

For example, if you’re looking for a webpage that has both photos and descriptions, you can use Instant Previews to quickly identify these pages by navigating across the visual search results with a few swipes of your finger. Or perhaps you’re looking for an article, a step-by-step instructions list, or a product comparison chart—with Instant Previews, you can see easily spot pages with the right content without having to navigate back and forth between websites and search results.

iOS 4 or later is required for Instant Previews, and you can try them on your iPhone now. Promo video and another screenshot below. More information available here. Read more