I'll admit it. I'm an avid Gmail user, but I don't use the mobile site. There's too much clicking. And waiting. And clicking. It's entirely too much like the WAP sites of yesteryear, you remember. Back when SMS texting was the brand new thing. I don't use the mobile Gmail site. Until today. Today, I discovered the HTML5 version of Gmail on my OS6 BlackBerry.
The new version of the Gmail mobile site is like night and day compared to the old. The experience with the site is much like sitting at your home computer, though slimmed down and optimized for the BlackBerry experience. Buttons appear and disappear as needed. Menus follow you around the page. Emails looks like they belong in the page, no need to zoom in and scroll left and right.
I am impressed with the mobile site, impressed enough to use it much more often now.
One Page to Rule the All
Like the home version, Gmail loads in just one page. The only time you'll see that Requesting...., Loading.... Bar at the bottom is when you first open the site. Emails, labels, and even options load within the same page and with minimal delay. Again, like in the home version, watch how you use that back button.
Contacts at your finger tips
Start to compose an email. Start to type a name. Immediately, you're presented with possible results for that name. Not pulled from your BlackBerry contacts, but from your Gmail contacts. Not finding the name you're looking for? Gmail will pull even more information from your contacts to give you every name and email address you could possibly be typing.
Search
Gmail holds all my important emails - past, present, and (presumably) future. My BlackBerry can not; it can store many messages, but I wouldn't expect to be able to search my BlackBerry for an email I got four years ago. The Gmail mobile site makes it possible for me to easily search for that four-year-old email.
The HTML5 Gmail mobile site offers BlackBerry OS6 users an experience more akin to the usual. Faster load times and easier ways to search contacts and messages make this new design a winner. The mobile site will never replace the speed of push email; but the features packed in to this HTML5 site means I'm going be using it much more often.
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