If you happen to have an iPhone and point Safari towards http://www.google.com on it, you will see a much nicer, specifically-designed for iPhone interface. Along the top now exist big, touchable areas for ‘Home’, ‘Gmail’, ‘Calendar’, ‘Reader’, and ‘More’. While almost all of these applications had been previously optimized for the iPhone already, it is nice to see them all unified under the main Google site on the iPhone.

According to TechCrunch, Google used Joe Hewitt, the man behind Facebook’s absolutely amazing iPhone app (still, no exaggeration one of the best-looking and best-functioning Internet apps I’ve ever used) – so it should be no shock that Google’s actually seems quite similar, just much simpler given that it’s basically just connecting 4 completely separate pages together rather than a ton of different data via Facebook.

One thing I’m most impressed with is that the Google search box includes suggested searches – nice touch and way to use the iPhone’s highly touted JavaScript. The other most impressive aspect has to be the speed. Forget about bookmarking all these sites seperately – just bookmark Google.com and fly through all of them in seconds.

Strangely certain elements like ‘All Items’, ‘Feeds’, and ‘Tags’ in Google Reader are repeated along the top in the sub nav for Google Apps. You would have thought Google would have caught this and simply removed the subnav in this instance as it’s completely redundant.

Also, the ‘More’ button, while nice to have, basically just dumps you onto Google’s oldschool (by comparison) mobile products page. I find this odd as at least some of these apps (such as Google Docs and Picasa) have been upgraded to be optimized for the iPhone while others have not (Blogger, SMS).

Google built for the iPhone continues the kind of strange, but fantastic (in my opinion) tradition of building sites specifically for Apple’s phone. I say “kind of strange” only because the iPhone was touted as having the “real” Internet on your phone, yet site after site is now changing the way they are built to tailor them to this device (which again I think is great, just kind of against the original point).

Google nailed Google Reader for the iPhone last month – and I think have updated it recently to make it even better with little things like taking you back to your tags list when you select ‘mark all as read’ – it’s good to see that they’re moving this attention to detail on to the other apps as well. We still need Google Talk though so I can stop racking up the text message bills…

[UPDATE]: Scoble already has a (kind of hard to see) video of the new interface up on Seesmic – still, gotta love technology with the quick, wide-ranging turnaround on breaking stories.

[UPDATE 2]: Here’s Google’s official PR about it and the write up on the Official Google Mobile Blog.