14 DAY TRIAL // These days, one of the most popular pieces of news is surely represented by the new Gmail which seems to be in the labs although the Mountain View company didn't say much about it. Besides loading time improvements and some other features, we don't know too many details about the new Gmail. But Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped reported that some of the registered users are now able to see a 'Newer Version' link which allows them to switch to a new flavor of the mail technology which appears to be the long-discussed one. I'm not one of the lucky guys to see the special button, as Philipp Lenssen notes, but the new Gmail has several new goodies.
"When you add a picture for a contact, you can pick a file straight from Google's Picasa Web Albums. Skipping the hard disk might seem like no big deal but we may see more and more of this in the online OS/ online office," he noted on the Google Blogoscoped page. "The "More Actions" menu has been turned into an HTML layer; in Gmail 1x it was an actual select box element. The menu now also includes the new entry "Filter messages like these" which opens a partly pre-filled "Create a filter" dialog."
As far as I can see from the screenshots, there is no interface update except the Contact Manager where you can enter lots of details for any of your friends. The Contact Manager was a part of the rumors so it seems that the speculations turned to be true although we all expected to see the improvement at a later time.
Apart from all these improvements, Gmail was recently updated with IMAP support while the storage counter was also sped up in order to offer more space for the registered members.