Google Makes Mobile Gmail, The Iterative Web App, Faster Than Before

Posted by Shel in Google on June 11, 2009 12:30 am / no comments

If you have been wondering what Google has been up to, wonder no more. They’ve been working on a way to make the mobile version of their landmark email service stronger, faster, smarter. Like the six million dollar man.

Not quite, but it will auto-complete for you as you begin to type in a name or address.

At Google we’re always looking for a way to do things faster. Today, we’re announcing two improvements that will speed up your Gmail for mobile experience.

The first improvement is faster address auto-completion. This means that as you begin typing the first few letters of your friend or colleague’s name or email address, Gmail for mobile will quickly display possible contacts. We sped up this process by reusing previously fetched matches in subsequent searches.

The second improvement is that we’ve enabled keyboard shortcuts for Android-powered devices with a physical keyboard. Now you can use all those familiar Gmail keyboard shortcuts to quickly move through your inbox. For example, if you’re reading an email you can press ‘u’ to return to the inbox or ‘n’ to move to the next conversation.

To try out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports iPhone/iPod Touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.

As you can see, as per normal, Blackberry, Palm and everything else will have to wait to give this one a go. But we can give Google a pass, (a short one) we know they are hard at work.

Google

Tags: Android, Google, iPhone, iPod Touch, Software