The Mobile Version of Gmail Is Here – a Review

http://m.gmail.com

Have you ever tried to access your gmail account on your Pocket PC? Yes, it's pretty tiresome, especially on a QVGA device and/or on a pre-WM2003SE one without any means of any kind of a One column view mode. The mobile version of Gmail has been recently started and, if you visit the Gmail portal using Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) using its standard user-agent identification, it'll already present the mobile version. Please note that not even the latest, 3.3 TP 1.03 version of probably the best Pocket PC Web browser, NetFront is able to use 'standard' Gmail to its full potential. Much as he latest NetFront has flawless JavaScript capabilities, it still can't run ActiveX components and, therefore, won't be able to run the rich editor component Gmail has (see this screenshot). The mobile version, as with the Yahoo Mail mobile client (see this blog entry on it), is VERY restricted. For example, with the standard one, you can send attachments (see this screenshot), but not with the mobile version (see the GUI of the latter here) if you use the above-mentioned NetFront version 3.3 TP 1.03. Note that you can't do the same with PIE, not even run through Skweezer or similar tools to make the otherwise inaccessible buttons clickable – see this screenshot. Also the address book of the mobile version is read-only. All you can do is listing and searching in it. All in all: the mobile version could be much better... it's not at all better (but isn't worse either) than the mobile-optimized version of Yahoo Mail. Other links worth checking out, in addition to the above links: PPCT