Google launches mobile java-client for Gmail
Posted on | November 2, 2006 | 2 Comments
with todays release of a java-based client for Gmail, Google gives recognition to the uprising market of web-access via mobile- or smartphone. and while the stripped down html-version of Gmail (http://m.gmail.com) has been doing quite a good job for some time, this dedicated app will surely make mobile email more efficient. from the press-release:
- Up to five times faster access and use, thanks to automatic pre-fetching of messages
- Drastically reduced clicks and scrolling to access email
- Fewer keystrokes for reading, composing, or searching mail
- Attachments, including files and photos, viewable and automatically resized to fit the user’s phone
the java-client, which should work on most modern phones, can be downloaded by visiting gmail.com/app (unfortunately, the actual download of the package currently doesn’t work for my Nokia 6630 
).
update: the download finally worked today! Gmail has a very low footprint (the jar-package is only 112 kbytes), therefor loading quickly into memory. messages are opened with almost no delay, thanks to smart pre-fetching. another highlight are the keyboard-shortcuts for searching (‘1′) and composing (‘2′) new mails – simple, but a real timesafer. on the downside, the java-client currently doesn’t allow logins with accounts from Google Apps for Domains (Google’s product allowing Gmail to be used as mail-service for your personal internet domain), at least it didn’t work with mine. still, the mobile client is highly recommended and might even be a reason to switch from your current email-solution to Gmail.
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2 Responses to “Google launches mobile java-client for Gmail”
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November 18th, 2006 @ 6:55 pm
Everything about Gmail mobile was cool and great (speed, google look, simplicity…) but the main problem is that I can’t watch my other mail account on yahoo and hotmail. I found one app that can view all mail accounts and it supports POP, IMAP and Webmail
It`s called Movamail http://movamail.com/ and I think ill use that instead of gmail app.
November 18th, 2006 @ 7:02 pm
agreed, the biggest downside of gmail in general is the lack of support for fetching foreign pop/imap-accounts. I circumvent this by copy-forwarding all my other mailboxes to gmail, unfortunately freemailers like hotmail don’t allow forwards. so that’s a deadend…
movamail looks nice & I might give it a try, but I’m quite sure it won’t sync with my main mailbox (=gmail), so it’s not really a permanent option.
thx for your comment!