If you were ever wondering, how you could see if someone is using Google Talk from an Android device, here is the solution. In your Google Mail web interface go to Settings, select the Labs tab, and turn on the “Green Robot” extension: this will display a robot icon for the users from an Android device, while the coloring indicates the availability of the person.

It really makes sense: your friends can see, that you are logged in from your phone, so they know if you are available and do not answer, this is maybe because you do not have a free hand at the moment.

To be honest, there is still some room for improvements. The robots only appear on the web interface, and not in the Windows standalone chat client. On the other hand if you are an Android device owner, you have to notify every friend of yours, that they should enable this extension if they want to see whether you are sitting in a front of a PC, or you are on the go. This should happen somehow the other way round: you enable that your friends can see if you are on Android, and then everyone should see the Droid icon…