iPhone and Android Enhancements

By Chuck Tomasi on June 20th, 2009

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If you’re an iPhone or Android user, you’ll definitely want to look at the recent changes to the mobile web Gmail interface for those devices. Google has made some major improvements to the UI.

First, Gmail mobile now supports labels for your email conversations very much like the desktop version. Now you can add color coded tags to respective emails for managing your inbox while you’re on the go. You can find the Label feature in the new “floating menu bar”, as I call it, that also has buttons labeled “Archive”, “Delete”, and “More”. Click on “More” and select “Label As” just below “Mute”.

Another new addition is address auto completion of recipients’ names. Now you can simply start typing a name and Gmail will start filling in the name for you.

Finally, my favorite – keyboard shortcuts. Yes, now you can use keyboard shortcuts if you own an Android phone. Most of the same keyboard shortcuts map the same way they do on the desktop. From the official Gmail blog at Google, “if you’re reading an e-mail you can press ‘u’ to return to the inbox or ‘n’ to move to the next conversation.”

Interestingly, these changes to the iPhone and Adroid platform came at the same time in April 2009 when they completely redesigned their mobile application. This is a change from previous enhancements which came out on the larger target audience of the iPhone first.
This new Gmail interface is available for iPhone/iPod Touch with OS 2.2.1 versions and Android-powered devices in U.S. English language only.

Look for more nice tweaks to the mobile version of Gmail in the future and keep listening to the Gmail Podcast to stay up to date on them.