GMail for mobile devices just got an upgrade with a new version of the official GMail Mobile Java application. This iteration is supposedly faster and acts more like the browser interface you're used to from your PC, compared to older versions.
Available for over 300 models of Java-enabled phones, smartphones, and PDAs from gmail.com/app, the new applet will start shipping preinstalled on phones from Sprint/NexTel, T-Mobile, Cingular, and BellSouth in the near future.
First impressions around the Orbiting HQ boil down to "cool, this is good if I remember to check it, but I wish it told me when I had new mail." The application does look and feel a lot like the PC browser GMail, but fails to use new mail notification features—at least on BlackBerrys.
It's also a lot faster than going through the phone's browser to gmail.com, mostly thanks to a prefetching feature that preloads the first ten messages in your inbox for instant access when you click on them. If you're worried about bandwidth issues, that prefetch mode can be turned off. Functionality has been streamlined, too: archiving a message used to take 11 clicks in the old Java client, but now takes just two.
Other features you're used to from the standard browser GMail interface have moved onto the mobile client, such as the search function and the ability to quick-view attached documents like PDFs, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets.
Will a world addicted to BlackBerry e-mail switch over to GMail on a plethora of Java-enabled phones? If the notofication issue could be worked out, the app would instantly become much more useful, and when phones start to ship with the applet preinstalled, that will remove the initial hurdle of installing the thing. But not everybody likes the GMail interface, and it's not easy to switch a user from old habits. On the other hand, this could open up mobile e-mail access for a host of GMail addicts that couldn't stomach the slow and rather ugly mobile browser interface.