The dispute concerned patents that Klausner holds covering so-called visual voicemail, which makes voicemail work more like email by sending visual alerts of voice messages to computers or phones, allowing users to selectively retrieve the messages.

Visual voicemail is a key feature of many of the latest touchscreen phones on the market, including Apple’s iPhone. New York-based Klausner holds several patents relating to the technology in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Klausner grabbed the attention of the mobile phone industry in late 2007 when his company, privately held Klausner Technologies Inc, sued Apple and six other companies for $360 million for violating patents on visual voicemail technology.

Klausner declined to comment on Monday on the terms of the deal with Google, but said the Internet giant was now free to use the technology.

“Google has a license to Klausner’s visual voicemail patents,” he told Reuters by telephone.

As part of the deal, Klausner’s lawsuit against Google has been dismissed with prejudice, meaning that the issues cannot be later revived in court action between the two parties.

Google owns two types of services that could be broadly affected by Klausner’s patents.

It offers Web-based phone services through a start-up it acquired, Grand Central, and it has also built the Android open software platform for smartphones, which it has licensed to companies including T-Mobile and Vodafone.

Klausner did not say to what degree the agreement covered Android software when it was sublicensed by other parties.

Separately, Klausner said T-Mobile had agreed to license his European visual voicemail patents in 17 European countries. The agreement covers a new visual voicemail service that T-Mobile’s German unit announced at the CeBIT IT trade fair last week.

Klausner has never had a legal dispute with T-Mobile.

The deal would result in the first time a European operator has licensed visual voicemail technology for a mobile phone other than the iPhone.

A T-Mobile spokesman said: “We want to offer what currently has a working title of ‘visual mobile box’ to all our customers, not just those using the iPhone, for example.”

“The visual mobile box will be available in Germany soon, definitely in the first half of the year,” he said. “The application will be available on all phones that have the hardware to support it.”

Klausner licensed patents on personal electronic organizers, for example for address books, to Japanese consumer electronics makers in the 1970s and 80s. His company is currently working on patents for turning cellphones into movie or video projectors.

“Google believes that the browser market is still largely uncompetitive, which holds back innovation for users,” Sundar Pichai, Google vice president product manager, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

Google introduced the Chrome browser last year, which has taken little market share.

The Internet company joins the Mozilla foundation, producer of the Firefox Web browser, and Norway’s Opera, a privately held company. Google adds the voice of a significant and well-financed player in the case against Microsoft.

In January, European regulators brought formal charges against Microsoft for abusing its dominant market position by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser with its Windows operating system, which is used in 95 percent of the world’s personal computers.

If the preliminary views expressed in the EC’s Statement of Objections are confirmed, Microsoft could be subject to a fine and an order requiring it to cease bundling its browser and operating system.

joIn 2007, European Union courts upheld the European Commission’s finding that Microsoft violated antitrust law by bundling its Windows Media player with the Windows operating system. It also found Microsoft used illegal tactics against RealNetworks real player.

The company has been fined more than $2 billion for its violations and for failing to carry out remedies imposed by the Commission.

In 2000, a U.S. judge decided that Microsoft had broken the law after it combined its Internet Explorer browser and the Windows operating system. The most serious violations of the law were upheld on appeal, but the company continued to bundle its operating system and browser.

Google competes with Microsoft in several markets, including online search engines.

Pichai wrote that the company hopes its perspective in launching Chrome will “be useful as the European Commission evaluates remedies to improve the user experience and offer consumers real choices.”

Interveners traditionally provide background information, legal theories and proposed remedies to the Commision in cases.

The software let Gundotra browse and read e-mail even after he switched the phone into airplane mode, which shuts off the wireless network.

Offline applications can’t of course retrieve new data from the network, but they do synchronize when network access is restored. Meanwhile, it stores e-mail in a local database on the phone, even when online.

“You’ll note that it’s very, very fast because it’s using that local database,” Gundotra said. The application also showed a floating toolbar that was visible even as he scrolled through his inbox.

It’s significant for several reasons that Google is eyeing a new version of its Web-based Gmail application for the iPhone. For one thing, the company wants to bring to the iPhone all of Gmail’s features — search, labels, and conversations, for example — and Apple’s built-in mail application lacks those abilities.

But more broadly, the move is significant because it shows how Web-based applications can bypass the control particular companies such as Apple or Microsoft have over a computing technology.

Apple has achieved tremendous success with its App Store, which lets people download and buy software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. But it controls that conduit, and it only can deliver software written specifically for those devices.

Web applications run in a Web browser, and all smart phones have browsers — though of course hardware and network constraints typically mean they’re anemic compared to desktop versions.

In case this point about the power of Web applications was lost on observers, Gundotra showed the same Gmail software running on the HTC Magic, a new phone using Google’s Android operating system.

“You now have an ability to build an app that spans devices as long as that device implements the latest specifications of these modern HTML 5 Web browsers,” Gundotra said.

The mobile phone version of the Gmail software uses a somewhat different approach to enable offline access.

Where the desktop version uses a Google-developed open-source browser plug-in called Gears to enable offline support, the iPhone version uses the offline data storage standard of HTML 5, the gradually emerging overhaul of the language used to describe Web pages. That technology can cache the state of an application as well as data such as messages.

Of course, getting a modern, full-featured browser on a PC with plenty of memory is hard enough, and mobile browsers generally lag PC versions.

However, it should be noted that Safari on the iPhone, like the browser in Android, is based on the WebKit open-source project, and WebKit has been building in offline support. So at least on some higher-end phones, a Web-based version of offline Gmail could be an option sooner rather than later.

The move is a further step by the search giant into the mobile phone market, where Apple Inc has encountered success with its iPhone.

Developers such as Electronic Arts Inc have been anxious to expand sales of their mobile phone games to the Android Market, which has been limited to free applications until now.

Google said in a statement on Friday that consumers will have to pay for the applications via its Google Checkout payment product.

Google’s Android Market will initially carry paid applications from developers in the United States and Britain, with plans to allow developers in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France and Spain to participate later this quarter.

The focus of the cellphone market has been shifting to software development since Google and Apple entered the mobile market during the past two years.

The market for software platforms on cellphones is led by the Symbian operating system but it has lost ground over the last year to Apple, Research in Motion and other newcomers.

Nokia , the world’s No.1 cellphone maker, last year bought out other shareholders of UK-based smartphone software maker Symbian and has pledged to make its software royalty-free to other phone makers in response to new rivals.

Since then, 78 companies have said they plan to join the Symbian Foundation to get access to its software.

Atelier, Bank of America , Gemalto, Imagination Technologies, Mobica, Nanoradio, Omron Software, SanDisk , SESCA, SiRF Technology and VirtualLogix said on Thursday they would join the foundation.

In December Google’s Android camp announced new members, increasing its membership to 47.

Nokia will contribute Symbian’s assets to the not-for-profit Symbian Foundation, uniting with leading handset makers, network operators and communications chipmakers to create an open-source platform.

Nokia has said it sees the Symbian Foundation as a faster way to bring new products to market. Foundation members also avoid having to pay fees to outside software developers.

Nokia expects to release the first Symbian Foundation software this year and introduce a new platform by June 2010.