A couple of months ago, Google brought a simple but effective task manager into Gmail, courtesy of Gmail’s Labs proving ground for new features. Now it’s brought the feature to the iPhone, using a Mobile Safari-friendly interface:
The desktop version of Google Tasks emphasizes simplicity and speed over features; the iPhone one (which you reach by visiting http://gmail.com/tasks) is even more basic. I wish that it, like the desktop one, were integrated with Gmail itself–when I’m in Gmail on the iPhone, I’d like to be able to bop quickly into Tasks, and to be able to instantly turn an e-mail message into a task. (On the iPhone, the two services are sepearate and unrelated.) You also can’t indent tasks on the iPhone.
But Tasks for Gmail is snappy and useful–and it’s especially welcome given that the iPhone still has no native task manager. For now, though, I’m sticking with the iPhone version of Remember the Milk. It’s part of RTM’s paid Pro service, which runs $25 a year, but unlike Google Tasks, it brings all the richness of its full-blown Web version to the iPhone. And I like supporting Remember the Milk, a very small company that consistently makes worthwhile products and does interesting things (like supporting offline access via Google’s Gears) before larger companies like Google get around to doing them…