Gmail Mobile 1.5, Java Application - Released

Google launched a new version for Gmail Mobile Java application for mobile phones.
If you go to gmail.com/app, on your Java-enable mobile phone and download the small application, you'll be able to use Gmail, almost as easy as on your desktop.

Gmail Mobile 1.5 makes it easier to access your contacts by adding an option in the menu. If you click on a contact, you'll see the same information available in Gmail's desktop interface: a photo, the email addresses, the phone numbers and other notes. If you entered the phone number in your contact's details, you can call him directly from Gmail.

Some key features:

• 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 application lets you save an unfinished message for sending it later. The weird thing is that the message is saved on your phone, not in Drafts, and you can only have one unfinished message at any given time.

If you care about your Internet traffic, Gmail shows the bandwidth usage every time it loads data. There's also an option for encrypting your traffic, but this is not recommended because it slows down the app.

But the most surprising feature (if you can call this a feature) is the thing that helped Hotmail grow, but it's still a big annoyance in the free versions of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail: the ad automatically added at the end of your message. Gmail Mobile 1.5 appends by default to your message:

"Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com"

Fortunately, you can disable Google's promotional message by going to the settings and unchecking the last option.

Gmail Mobile 1.5 seems to have a worse performance than the previous versions and it's still incompatible with Google Apps accounts. This release is currently available only in English.

You should check the requirements, the most important being J2ME (Java) MIDP2. Gmail Mobile is also available from your browser if you go to gmail.com (or m.gmail.com) on your mobile phone, but you won't get these features.

[via - Dotoca.net]