It’s happened again: I’m trying to use Gmail full time. This time I’m just using the newly optimized Gmail web app (three cheers for HTML5!), and, as usual, I’m pathetically excited about it. The Google Mobile blog recently announced that they’ve made the Gmail web app 2-3x faster, and it’s true: Gmail consistently loads up within Safari in about three seconds flat (down from six seconds). That’s from the moment after I tap on the Gmail homescreen shortcut to the moment that the web app becomes usable.
That’s pretty amazing, considering this is a web app we’re talking about. I’m using a free Boxcar account to provide the Push notifications, and I think I’ll be able to catch a lot more of my e-mail this way. Google Mobile started off by adding extras like the “floaty bar”, offline support, and swipe-to-archive to Gmail, but this is probably my favourite update yet. The speed and responsiveness of the app — even on EDGE — is amazing. Now the only question is how long it takes for another amazing jailbreak or App Store app to catch my eye and force Just Another Email Setup.
[thanks to @iPhoneAlley for the tip]
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Thanks – I'm back to this method after Googlesync (which looked promising at first) has literally fallen off the face of the Earth in terms of reliability.
Hey Wayne,
Well GoogleSync has been a little more reliable as of late, but I'm getting more and more annoyed with the silly Mail app. It's actually still quite buggy, since it loses individual emails all the time so that I've got to re-download them. Strange considering how awesome all of the other native iPhone apps….well, except Stocks
I still wonder if there's a dedicated app that has the features that isn't as memory-hungry as a browser?
I don't think so, since the only folks who could do that would be Google themselves – and hell if Apple's gonna let them release a kickass app
Best I'm thnking we can hope for is more HTML5 improvements and use Safari, or hope that they can sneak something into the Google Mobile application.
Been using Gmail on the iPhone for 3 or 4 months now. I love that I can label mail. I have about six different labels I have created for specific flags and archives. Really useful to me and can't be done in native iphone email app. Thanks for the heads up on the speed increase.
Cheers, Bryan!
Not to take away from this app, I still think Nuevasync is the BEST option for Gmail on the iPhone. You can search ALL your email in your account. The only downside is that you have to set it up as an Exchange service on your iPhone.
I was also using Nuevasync a few months back, but Google Sync seems to do about the same thing for free. Nueva switched to a paid service for certain things, if I'm not mistaken?
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