For those who need to quickly access their Gmail accounts while on-the-go, there is good news, as Google has recently updated its Gmail mobile client to version 2. Addressed at J2ME-based and BlackBerry phone owners, the new release brings both speed improvements as well as new features.

"We rearchitected the entire client to push all the processing to the background, greatly improved the client-side caching scheme and optimized every bottleneck piece of code we came across," explained Derek Phillips, software engineer at Google. So what does this mean? Well, according to the search giant, users should experience significant speed improvements, smoother scrolling and no freezing.

A welcome improvement is addressed to users who have both Gmail and Google Apps email accounts. Now, instead of having to use two different mobile applications to access their personal and work emails, they can access them from the same application.

Another useful feature is the possibility to save multiple email drafts on the handset so as to send them later, which works well in conjunction with the newly introduced offline support. Basically, this means that users can compose and read emails even when there is no signal available. All outgoing messages will be saved in the outbox of the phone and sent later upon entering a coverage zone. Unfortunately, despite the fact that many users were hoping, Wi-Fi support for accessing email without a mobile data plan has not been introduced yet.

And last but not least, some usability improvements have been added for owners of handsets with QWERTY keyboards with the introduction of shortcut keys. Some of these are 'z' for undo, 'k' for jumping to a newer conversation and 'j' for going back to an older one.

The new improved version of Gmail can be used on J2ME-enabled handsets supporting the MIDP 2.0 specification and users can find it in over 35 languages. The new release can be downloaded here. You can see the application in action in the video below.