Mountain View (CA) – Google upgraded its email application for the iPhone and Android devices that should result in a much more convenient use and much faster performance.
According to the company, Gmail for the iPhone and Android is now more responsive when open messages, integrates batch options and introduces some “basic” offline support.
There is also an updated interface, which enable users to archive or delete via Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). If you scroll the screen, those action options follow the screen movement and remain available to the user. The progress bar is now rendered through the HTML5 canvas tag, which does not require the download of animated GIFs anymore and reduces overall overhead.
More importantly, however, Gmail now does a lot more in the background, while you are not using it, and may improve the overall performance when you are actually using it. For example, when you are archiving emails, the data is stored in a cache (database on the iPhone, Gears database on Android devices) on the device itself initially and sent to Gmail servers when a connection is actually available. This cache is also applied when reading messages and users only have to wait for s server response when requesting an uncached message.
There is also some limited support for offline use, as the applications enables users to compose mail and open recently read messages while offline.
