Gmail for Mobile Significantly Improved with Offline Support
October 23, 2008 |
Earlier today the Gmail for mobile team introduced version 2.0 of Gmail for Mobile, the application that enables Gmail users to easier handle their Gmail accounts on the go. This version is an upgrade of the Gmail application for Java ME and BlackBerry phones.
Working on this new release the team focused mainly on the speed and reliability of the application so the users are supposed to notice significant speed improvement and overall improved performance.
As for the user-visible feature, the most important one is definitely offline access – even though the team labels it as “basic” for now. The offline features available with the application include reading of incoming messages and composing new messages that can be saved to the outbox to be automatically sent later when coverage is regained.
Another appealing feature of the mobile client for Gmail now enables users to manage multiple accounts instead of using separate applications for personal and business email accounts as it used to be until now. Once the multiple accounts are added to the application, the credentials can be saved to easily switch between different accounts.
The word “multiple” must be among the team’s favorites for this release as they have introduced yet another feature – multiple email drafts for users to be able to create and store more than one draft for future use.
Also added are keyboard shortcuts for those users of devices with a QWERTY keyboard and support of more than 35 languages. While I will probably always continue to criticize Google for their approach of crowdsourcing translation of their applications and making people use very poorly-translated apps
The first users of the new application have already started reporting problems with the application but they are mainly in the installation itself so chances are they are trying to install the application on devices that are simply not supported yet.
