Gmail Mobile Site upgrades to HTML5

Holding on to your feature phone with web access for fear of making the smartphone jump? Or maybe your exchange email setup on your smartphone is acting janky? These obstacles shouldn’t stop you from accessing your Gmail accounts via your mobile device. Gmail has a mobile site that breaks down the full desktop version and makes it “mobile friendly”. Now with the conversion to HTML5, the improved Gmail mobile site could get you out of a “I have no email access” jam.

One of the main advantages to moving to HTML5 is that pages load faster. Unlike before when you opened a page and got a separate “loading” page letting you know what is happening; emails, labels, and even options load within the same page and with minimal delay.

Another advantage is instead of searching your actual contacts on your phone, the mobile site searches your Gmail contacts. When you compose a message and start adding recipients, Gmail will display a drop-down list of possible contact results in an attempt to guess who your are addressing.

This last advantage may just be a reason why a smartphone user may opt to only use the Gmail mobile site over setting up an account on your phone – The ability to search ALL of your emails and not just those dating a couple months back; which is the average time-frame most people select when setting up their email account(s) on their smartphone. If you are vigilant and label, file or Archive your emails like you’re supposed to (instead of deleting them), you can now dig DEEP into your account and pull out some ancient emails all via the mobile site.

If you truly claim to be a mobile professional, why not use all of the mobile tools at your disposal? The Gmail mobile site, now upgraded to HTML5 has just become one of my tools. What about you? Check out the new site by visiting www.gmail.com on your phone and let me know what you think? Do you see yourself using the mobile site more often?