If there’s one thing to like about online services like Google, it’s that they can update their stuff whenever they want. Google has a penchant for making small but useful updates to their mobile search portal, and yesterday your searches for movies just got better. While we do have Flixster and Fandango available now on our webOS phones, there’s something to be said for the innate elegant simplicity of doing the Google.

Google recently updated their movie search options for mobile search, at least for those lucky enough to be using phones with WebKit browser (i.e. iPhone, Android, and webOS). A search for “Movies” on Google will yield a link to a “More movies” option that opens the new movie search page. From here Google throws together a map of nearby theaters and movies playing on their silvery screens (browsers with geolocation abilities, i.e. Safari on the iPhone, actually use GPS to locate nearby theaters).

In addition to just offering your local playtimes, clicking on a movie will bring up a page with movie summary, map to nearby theaters, more showtimes, cast info, and even images from the film. Throughout all these pages is a “Play trailer” link that pulls the trailer straight from YouTube so that you can watch it right on your phone. The only thing that’s missing? A way to buy tickets for your selected flick, but that’s probably because Google hasn’t yet bought somebody that does that.

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Less than a week after the Palm Pre landed in thousands of eager palms nationwide, the first local desktop synchronization solutions are coming. Perennial saver-of-Mac-Users Mark/Space has released the first beta of The Missing Sync for Palm Pre (with a PC version on the way). The Missing Sync creates a new Synergy profile for Calendar and Contacts and will sync with iCal and Address Book, or Microsoft Entourage if you so desire. The Missing Sync will also make it easy to sync music (via iTunes), photos, documents, movies, and more. It also comes with a Safari component that will send your bookmarks to a new bookmarks app on the Pre (which will then launch the links in Web).

The Missing Sync for Palm Pre also comes with proximity sync of your Synergy information over your Wi-Fi network, meaning you never have to think about syncing with your computer – it just does it. For a limited time, The Missing Sync will be available as a free beta application and can be found in the App Catalog on your Palm Pre, and the desktop component is up on Mark/Space.com. When The Missing Sync for Palm Pre comes out of beta, it will be available for $39.95.

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The big question (one of them) surrounding the Palm Pre is just how good is the browser? We know it’s based off the same open-source WebKit engine as the iPhone’s Safari browser, but the robustness of its features has been up in the air for, well, five months now. Thanks to Darth Pooh in our forums and his magical Pre access, we can note that the Pre’s browser is fairly robust, as it can handle both Google Docs (spreadsheet) and Reader, as seen above. They are the iPhone versions of the sites, but that’s not a bad thing by any measure.

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