Web giant Google stepped up its push into the mobile space this week, showing off new features on its Android mobile phone platform.

At the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, the company gave a brief flash of the mobile platform’s newest capabilities, showing how development is going over half a year since Android was announced.

We’ve seen Android running on a couple of white label prototype devices before, but Google has now added support for touchscreen devices, as well as rejigging the idle screen to show emails, missed calls and appointments as well as internet favourites. The touchscreen support incorporates a funky screen lock mechanism, which allows a user to unlock the device by drawing a shape. But one of the coolest sounding features is a compass which uses GPS to automatically reorient Google Maps depending on which direction the user is facing.

Andy Rubin, leader of the Android project, is sticking to his guns on the appearance of the first Android phones, so we should be seeing devices based on the platform before the year is out.

In a related announcement, social networking site MySpace has signed up to Google Gears to implement features allowing users to access and update their pages offline. Gears optimised sites make use of the storage and processing power on the user’s own device, synchronising the site with any updates when the user reconnects to the web.