To kick off MacWorld today, Google rolled out yet another new version of Google for the iPhone with speed and UI enhancements. Gmail now auto-refreshes, the UI across all apps has been prettied up, there is greater customization, and you finally don’t have to use the back-button an insane amount of times for Google Reader.

This update comes just over a month after they previously unified their Google services experience for the iPhone, and just a few days after they launched the iPhone version of iGoogle. And with data coming in that Google is seeing a huge amount of traffic come from visitors using iPhones, it’s really no surprise all the emphasis they are putting on these updates. Google clearly wants to make the Google iPhone experience every bit as good as the traditional computer one.

After playing around with everything the auto-refresh of Gmail seems great, but has stopped working a couple of times after switching between Google Apps. Google Calendar looks very nice, but does not seem to be syncing at all with my calendar at the moment – it simply says ‘no events scheduled’ for every day even though I have hundreds if not thousands of items on my calendar. Bad form here Google, launching a product and it simply not working.

Most importantly to me, Google has some small tweaks to the app that I will no doubt be using the most on the iPhone: Google Reader. I’ve already written a few times on how Google brought this app from just okay to excellent very quickly, but now they’ve finally gotten rid of some of the redundancy (why did there need to be ‘All items’ ‘Feeds’ and ‘Tags’ duplicated along the top twice?) and added the all important back-to-a-feed button. Before I was using Safari’s back-button to navigate entirely too much, now if you’re reading a particular feed item there is a button along the top to return to that feed’s list of stories. I still would like to see an easier (bigger) way to star and share an item, but this is a great small update.

All in all I think it’s great how quickly Google is working to make the user experience on the iPhone in line with what you get on a computer. If they can get the Calendar app actually working with the calendar data, this will be a homerun.

[UPDATE 1/16]: After speaking with a project team member at Google, it appears all shared calendars – which include any that are not your your main account calendar (whether you are sharing them or not) – are not yet working, hence me seeing no data. I was assured they are working quickly to implement this and then everything should be good.