Taking a cue from the YouTube team, the boys and girls at Google recently updated their mobile Gmail web app in order to make it behave more like a native iPhone app.
Go to gmail.com from your iPhone and you’ll notice two improvements we’ve rolled out over the past few weeks. First, scrolling is snappier: the speed of scrolling reflects the speed of your swipe gesture. This is helpful for long conversations where a few quick flicks will get you to the information you need much faster than before. Second, the toolbars stay on screen while you’re scrolling rather than moving down into view after each scroll. Being able to access your toolbars from any point on the page should make it easier to triage your email and move around the app. (Official Google Mobile Blog)
While the web app is much better than its predecessor, it still has all of the short comings of an iPhone web app, chief of those being the inability to upload content (like images) into a message, something our Android brethren can do via Chrome.
Despite the fact that Apple already provides users with a default mail app, truth be told it’s rather clunky and inefficient (especially when it comes to “starring” emails via IMAP).
Hopefully Google is seriously considering creating an official native Gmail app as that would allow users to check their messages while on the go, regardless of how strong their carrier’s signal is.
Originally posted on October 28, 2010 @ 1:52 pm