Google has released a version of Google Gears that runs on Windows Mobile 5.0/6 devices. What does that mean? It means that you can access web applications like Zoho Writer or Buxfer on your mobile, even when you're offline. You'll need to go online at some point to synchronize your data, but once that's done you can open and view your documents while you're on the subway or on the ocean floor (the two places we're pretty sure there's on internet access available).

This is pretty big news for Windows Mobile uses who are tired of dealing with Office Mobile. Zoho's online office suite offers most of the features you'd want from a word processor. And it's free. Right now you can't edit Zoho Writer documents in offline mode, but Zoho plans to add that functionality soon.

In somewhat related news, Microsoft and Nokia have signed a deal to use Silverlight in some of its phone and internet tablets. Right now, Silverlight is primarily a platform for displaying rich media content on the web (like Adobe Flash), Microsoft eventually plans to add offline functionality to Silverlight (like Adobe AIR or Google Gears). That means we could see offline support for online applications coming to Nokia devices one day as well.