Just in time for the release of the T-Mobile G1, the first Google Android-based phone, Google has updated the mobile client for its Gmail hosted e-mail app to make it faster and less prone to crashes. The new client works on Blackberries and other handsets that support J2ME (like the G1), but it’s not yet available for those based on Windows Mobile (surprise, surprise).
The new client focuses on improving Gmail performance on phones, where processing power is limited. As Google’s Derek Phillips says in his blog post announcing the upgrade:
“We rearchitected the entire client to push all the processing to the background, greatly improve the client-side caching scheme and optimize every bottleneck piece of code we came across.”
The result, he says, is faster and more reliable performance (no more screen freezes), quick switching between Gmail and Apps e-mail accounts, the ability to save multiple e-mail drafts to your phone, new shortcut keys for Qwerty keyboard users (like those with the G1), and better offline support, enabling users to create and read recent e-mails, even when they can’t get a good wireless signal. Google also posted a video to YouTube to help better explain the updates.
Google continues to steadily work at creating the optimal mobile experience, via its Chrome browser, Android OS and snappy designed-for-mobile applications like Gmail and Docs. And it also continues to leave anything with the word “Microsoft” on it out of the mix. So while the Gmail client gets better and better, perhaps its hoping Windows Mobile users relying on Exchange will start to feel like second-class citizens. Stranger things have happened.
