Even though many users were enthusiastically waiting for Google’s mobile application for the iPhone, which was initially announced for release last Friday, Apple didn’t complete its review and the app upload on the company’s Application Store has been rescheduled. For now there are no details about the new release date but the approval is expected over the next few days.

The Google Mobile App is an iPhone application which enables users to begin a search by speaking into the device. A complete video demonstration is already available on YouTube, showing off its multiple uses. The searches are performed on spoken requests and also using location information – once a user will demand information about a certain topic, the search’s top results will first show details from the user’s location – if he is in New York and asks for ‘movies,’ the results will first show movies playing in New York.

The mechanism works very well and fast, converting the sound to a digital file which is then sent to Google’s servers. From this point on, the words are identified and passed through the Google search engine.

The app must be manually activated and there is a motion sensor that detects when to listen. The Google Mobile App also connects users to all the other Google features such as Gmail, Google News, Google Maps and so on.

Google’s release plans have been put on hold as a result of Apple’s approval process, which is known to take quite a long time, as there are many aspects that need to be considered. There have been many issues related to this process, as many developers focused their efforts on certain apps, strictly targeting the iPhone, and were surprised to find out that their work was dismissed by the company for various reasons.

The company’s decision to release the app on the iPhone should be appreciated by everyone, as Google could have prepared it for its own Android G1, which would have surely boosted the sales in this year’s fourth quarter. Google proved that its main focus is set on what’s best for customers and decided, for starters, to offer the service to a wider public, as the iPhones sales are significantly greater than the G1’s. It is also clear that the app will help boost Apple’s sales, as the voice recognition and mobile platform will attract even more people to the iPhone.

There is no doubt that a version for its own device is currently in development but for now, there are no details about its features or release date. Maybe the plan is to see how well it does, as the user feedback usually helps fix all sorts of glitches found in these releases.

Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, involved for many years in the development of voice recognition, explained for the New York Times that the recognition will never be perfect, but because the research in this domain is very intense, “Whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months;” which might also point out that the release of its second version will be significantly better.