Google’s New Gmail for the iPhone

The lack of a native Gmail app on the iPhone has been a major source of irritation for most users. If it was not for the mobile version of Gmail supported by Safari, many users would have simply flipped! The good news is that Gmail is being heavily revamped for the iPhone.

The current mobile Gmail is pretty good but clearly the people at Google want to give you better. If you load it up today, you may notice that the look and feel has changed, with a dark blue tinge and rounded buttons being the first to catch your eye. More importantly the position of buttons has been changed and keys have even been deleted! 

The header bar has now got just a ‘Menu’ and a large ‘Compose’ button along the unread messages counter. The ‘Search’ as well as the ‘Reload’ buttons are now not there anymore.

Probably the ‘reload’ button has been done away with because the new Gmail will be auto-loading and so you will not need to refresh the page for new emails which may have come in. This feature will come in really handy, because all web versions of Gmail refresh automatically between intervals and bring up new emails efficiently.

Another change you may notice is the presence of a new bar under the main menu bar, which houses the ‘archive’, ‘more’ and ‘delete’ options. Right now these options are only available when you select a particular mail.

Just remember that these changes are still being tested and so you yet may or may not be able to catch them together when you start up Gmail. But if these changes are affected soon, it will be great for users. In tandem with the recently announced Push Notification version of the Google mobile app, this should make using Gmail on the iPhone really easy.

Gmail has officially neither accepted nor denied that these changes are being tested and will soon be made available to users. The company maintains that it is ‘always experimenting’ in order to deliver upgrades and new products to users. But, given that Gmail has been redone for the iPad, can changes for the iPhone be far behind?

Written by Jay Shah on August 26th, 2010

Nurturing a lifelong love affair with machines, Jay simply loves any tech that can make life easier, better, faster and more enjoyable. And with hundreds if not thousands of Gadgets, Apps, Games being launched everyday, there's more than enough out there to keep this hardcore techie occupied and obsessed!