Google launches Gmail for mobile 2.0

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Google

has updated its mobile Gmail application, boosting performance and allowing users to access their mailbox while offline or in areas with weaker coverage.

Scrolling should become smoother and frozen screens should be consigned to history with Gmail for mobile 2.0, according to the search giant.

The new version is aimed at J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones and includes basic offline access for devices such as Nokia’s N95, Sony Ericsson’s W910i and BlackBerry’s Curve, as well an enabling users to access more than one Gmail or Google Apps email application through the same application.

The latter addition, according to Google, will mean “you will no longer have to use two different mobile apps to access personal and work emails.” What’s more, when emails are created in offline mode, they are saved and automatically sent as soon as the devices has a strong enough connection again.

“Our focus for this version was to make the experience faster and more reliable,” Derek Phillips, a software engineer in Google’s mobile team, posted in the company’s mobileblog. “We rearchitected the entire client to push all the processing to the background, greatly improve the client-side caching scheme and optimise every bottleneck piece of code we came across.”

Other user experience niceties added to the new version include the ability to save multiple email drafts, and the ability to use QWERTY keypad shortcuts to speed up email communications.

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