14 DAY TRIAL // Google's push into the Mobile world has had people wonder at one point last year whether their product will be a handheld device or an operating system. I guess that waiting a while before taking sides or betting for or against one of the two paid off and now, it's well known what the future will hold. Not a distant future at that, mind you!
Until the release of the GPhone, Google users will just have to sit back and marvel at the rate things are speeding up, while the date of the big release is approaching. For now, our views of what the Mountain View based company is doing behind closed doors is limited only at the products that they release for the Mobile market.
Gmail, the popular mail service from Google has been updated with a new look and a new feel for the iPhone, faster and more fluid. Alex Kennberg wrote on the Official Gmail Blog that the dev team's goal was to make it fit in nicely as a part of the latest "Google on the iPhone experience".
AJAX, a set of web development techniques that make web pages more responsive has been used in order to achieve that effect. Also added were two of the features in the Gmail2.0 version, pre-fetching messages and auto-complete, so anytime you'll be using your iPhone to check your Gmail account you'll be pretty close to the experience you'd have while using a desktop system, with messages showing up on the screen in a snap (as opposed to the seconds of delay that were needed to firstly load one message in the cache and then empty it in for the second one to load) and addresses being easier to find in case you've forgotten them. Taking into account that you don't exactly have a keyboard at your disposal to plug in the iPhone, this is a damn good feature to have been added.
Some work has also been put in resizing the buttons because keeping them the same would have only been frustrating, given the touch screen available.
Fire up those babies and browse to Google.com in your web browser, hit the Gmail tab and see it all unfold before your very eyes. It's worth it.