The Google+ social network is growing steadily still and it has just welcomed iPad and iPod Touch users. Up until now the iOS app was only available to the iPhone, but the update that was just released fixed that. The bad news here is that iPad users are getting nothing more than an upscaled iPhone version that plainly is not optimized for the bigger screen.

The update to the app also brings new Huddle settings, aggregated circle add notifications and last, but not least performance and stability improvements. Hangouts are still missing in the latest version, though.

The Google dev team announced a new feature for the Gmail web interface. The world most popular mailbox just got a preview pane, which allows you to check out an email without opening.

Its almost hard to believe that this feature, which has been available on most desktop email clients and even the web interfaces of some competing mail services for a while now, is only now making its way to Gmail.

To enable this you will need to enter the Labs tab in Gmail Settings, where you will see a toggle button in the top right corner of your message list, which lets you switch between preview and list views.

After yesterdays update for Google Maps for Android, today is Gmail turn the updated Android app now boasts better performance, can save bandwidth by syncing only priority email, and gives you fine-grained control over notifications.

For each label that you have enabled syncing, you can enable/disable notifications and select a ringtone for each one. Depending on how you set up your Gmail filters, this can be used, for example, to assign different ringtones for emails from colleagues and from family.

Gmail v2.3.5 for Android also remembers for which senders you have hit "Show Pictures" so you do not have to do it every time.

The sticky message actions can now be selectively be switched off in landscape mode or altogether. The new Gmail app also features better TalkBalk support for accessibility and general performance improvements.

Google a company that can best be described as an engineer wet dream. It was founded by engineers, its run by engineers, and unless you have got hard data to support any of your statements during a meeting, you will be ignored. That being said, the stereotype of engineers being a bit… how should we put this, out of touch with both the formal and informal rules governing society, is definitely there when you look at some of the past decisions they have made around the areas of user privacy just look at Google Buzz.

The world breathed a collective sigh of relief about a month ago when former CEO Eric Schmidt said that despite the company having facial recognition technology in house, "its the only technology that Google built and after looking at it, we decided to stop." That does not explain then this recent report from the Wall Street Journal that says Google has spent an as yet to be identified sum of money on a 7 year old company known as Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition; "PittPatt" for short. Its lead by 3 specialists with Phs from Carnegie Mellon University, exactly the type of talent Google loves.

Google Plus, or Google+, is now available for iOS in the iTunes App Store. The social networking service, in which you divide up your friends, family and acquaintances into "Circles" has taken off in the past few weeks and has even seen defectors from Facebook. When the service launched, we said that mobile users might make or break it, and that most early adopters probably use mobile devices for social networking. Google+ has been available for Android since it launched, and now iPhone and iPad users can finallyenjoy a mobile version of it, too.

Here is the iTunes description of the app:

Google+ for mobile makes sharing the right things with the right people a lot simpler. Huddle lets you send super-fast messages to the people you care about most. And no matter where you are, the stream lets you stay in the loop about what your friends are sharing and where they’re checking in.

Features:
* Circles let you share the right things with just the right people.
* Stream is where you can get updates from your circles or see what people are saying about things nearby.
* Huddle is super-fast group messaging for everyone in your circles.

Google+ is only available for users 13 and older.