Today we're introducing a major revision to Gmail for mobile that takes advantage of the latest browser technology available on iPhone and Android devices. We've updated the user interface, made it faster to open messages, allowed for batch actions (like archiving multiple messages at once), and added some basic offline support
Despite the advent of 3G networks and wifi, smartphones still lack a high-speed, always-on broadband connection and can have connections far less reliable than their desktop brethren. So, just like when we redesigned the Gmail for mobile client app last October, we've gone back to the drawing board and redesigned Gmail for the mobile browser to overcome some of these limitations. We made performance more consistent, regardless of connection type, and laid the foundation for future improvements.
Now, when you go to gmail.com from your iPhone or Android browser, archiving email is quicker because it doesn't require a response from a remote server. Instead, we cache mail on the device itself (using database storage on the iPhone and a device-local mobile Gears database on Android-powered phones). Actions like archiving or starring messages are first applied to this cache and then sent to Gmail servers in the background whenever a network connection is available. You only have to wait for a response from the server when you're requesting an uncached message or list of messages. As a result, you can start-up Gmail even if you're on a slow connection. You can even compose mail and open recently read messages while offline.
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The iPhone's operating system has secured the fourth-largest share of the global smarphone OS market, and has been increasing fourfold annually. While it has won the hearts of many, it has done so despite a prominent lack of certain built-in functions. The "Top 8" of these absent features are: MMS support, Adobe Flash support, video recording, Bluetooth modem tethering, push notifications, SMS forwarding, background applications, and -- an old favorite among the Mac faithful -- cut-and-paste.
While cut-and-paste functionality, and roughly four of the top eight needed functions were indeed added, they were piled under no less than a dozen other new abilities intended to advance videogaming on iPhone.
Background processing, video capture, and Flash support were not listed among the iPhone's newest features. However, the painfully absent support for MMS has at last been added, and message forwarding has been included as well. And push notification has been added, but in a uniquely Apple way. The "Apple Push Notification Service" can retrieve messages from third-party servers without continually running an app in the background.
Cut, Copy, and Paste lets the user double-tap the screen and then slide a selection tool over the desired text to be altered, while a long press of the screen highlights large blocks of text. Somewhat like an Etch-a-Sketch, the user must shake the iPhone to undo selections.
The Maps API has been opened, finally allowing turn-by-turn navigation software; and a universal search feature called "Spotlight" has been added, which lets the user search through mail, contacts, calendar, notes, and iPod data. Though only touched upon momentarily in the presentation, Spotlight updates the iPhone's home screen with an additional panel that bears a strong resemblance to the home screen of the Palm Pre.
Another common complaint about previous iPhone versions was the lack of a standard landscape-mode keyboard for all applications, most notably within Mail. This function has been added too, along with enhancements to Calendar, the Stocks app and the addition of Voice memo. Tethering was not discussed in the presentation, and it was only mentioned in the Q&A afterward, essentially repeating the rumors that the ability is pending. The major improvements in the iPhone 3.0 SDK, it seems, appear to benefit game developers the most.
Furthering the device's image as a video game platform, Apple has included microtransactions within the app store, enabling what it calls "In-app Purchasing." When a user has purchased a game, for example, additional content can then be added with their approval, and their iTunes account will be automatically billed. The iPhone has also received peer-to-peer IP connectivity via Bonjour, which will allow local multiplayer games.
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Google's popular email service Gmail, which has over a 110 million users worldwide, went offline at around 2 p.m. Tuesday, affecting users throughout the world, especially in Europe and India.
In a statement, Google said "a number of users" were having problems with Google Mail. "The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 0930 GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We're really sorry about this ... our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem," said Acacio Cruz, Gmail site reliability manager.
Now, Google is making amends for an e-mail outage by giving 15 days of free service to businesses, government agencies and other subscribers who pay for an expanded version of the product.
Apparently users accessing the web version of the email were experiencing problems, with the POP (post office protocol) downloading and mobile access through iPhone and Google's own G1 still working fine.
Users worldwide resorted to twitter, the Gmail thread registering about 100 tweets per second, to discuss the problems.
"Gmail is getting HTTP:502 errors from Gmail. Anyone else got this or does it just hate me today?" said a post on the twitter thread by sciamachy (screen name).
Not just that, another thread by the name of gfail was getting constant updates on the gmail snag.
"Trouble In The Clouds: Gmail Turns Into Gfail," crazyengineer posted on his tweet.
"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users. This problem occurred at approximately 1.30 a.m. Pacific Time. We're working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them," Google posted on its support page.
"We apologise for any inconvenience that this has caused," it added.
This is Google's second major technical failure in less than a month. In January, all Google search results were affected by what Google called a "manual failure" returning malware errors to every search query.
Google did not say how many clients were affected by the incident, but reports of trouble flooded the internet from all over the world.
Google stressed that problems with Gmail were very rare, but the incident was seen as a major embarrassment for the company, which is trying to persuade computer users to store more of their data online.
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Google now aims to educate Indians about power of Internet with its 'Internet Bus'.
The Internet-enabled bus will focus on the four themes - education, information, communication, and entertainment. It will be loaded with useful and informative content in English and Tamil. Google said it will showcase how the Internet can make everyday life simple through services like search, email, social networking, maps and others.
The bus project took off from Chennai yesterday and will reach Vellore tomorrow and will cover numerous cities in Tamil Nadu over the next month and a half.
You can visit the Internet Bus Project website to see when the bus will visit your city; get regular updates. You can also check out photos and videos as Google travels around Tamil Nadu.
Here is the schedule that the Google Internet Bus will follow:
February
03 Feb Chennai
05 Feb Vellore
06 Feb Krishnagiri
07 Feb Salem
11 Feb Erode
12 Feb Tiruppur
14 Feb Coimbatore
18 Feb Dindigul
19 Feb Madurai
23 Feb Tirunelveli
25 Feb Nagercoil
27 Feb Tuticorin
March
02 Mar Pudukkottai
03 Mar Tiruchirappalli
06 Mar Thanjavur
08 Mar Kumbakonam
10 Mar Neyveli
12 Mar Cuddalore
13 Mar Tiruvannamalai
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One of the most fascinating tidbits from Google's announcement last week of offline capability for Gmail was this: The company says when it stores your messages for offline viewing, it tries to choose the most interesting ones. It's a sensible, if somewhat creepy strategy -- after all, why waste your disk space on messages you'll never want to read again? But after looking at the results on my own email account, I can't see any evidence that, in my case at least, Google is successfully separating the wheat from the chaff.
Here's exactly what Google says in its online support:
"We try to download your most recent conversations along with any conversations that seem to be important (regardless of their age). We also try not to dowload [sic] uninteresting conversations. This process is done heuristically and as with any heuristic can and will miss things. We'll continue to tune things up, but more importantly, we'll eventually provide a UI that will allow you to change the settings."
I asked a Google rep if someone could give me more detail on the process, but he declined. So we're left with this somewhat cryptic explanation. (When I first started hearing the word heuristic a few years ago, I thought it actually meant something. After hearing it applied to countless mysterious and diverse technological processes over the years, I've concluded that it's really just a polite way of saying "You wouldn't understand.")
So Google seems to be saying it analyzes your messages to figure out whether they're important or interesting (certainly not always the same thing). Does it do that by looking at the content (it already processes the content of your messages to serve up contextual ads)? Does it look at the activity a message engenders -- the number of responses, etc.? My guess is they'd use a combination of both methods.
But whatever the strategy is, it doesn't seem to be working, at least on my Gmail account. I looked at what Gmail did with uninteresting, unimportant messages and what it did with very important and interesting missives. What I found was it seems to be doing the exact same thing with both kinds of messages.
I started by looking at all the mail in my offline cache. Basically Gmail has kept a pretty comprehensive collection of my mail back to the beginning of December 2008, about 6,500 messages. It also kept other messages that have a few select labels. (Google says that it chooses some labels that will be completely cached. Here's Google's baroque explanation of how it chooses those labels: "Additionally, we'll download any conversation marked with a label that contains less than 200 conversations, has at least one conversation that has been received in the last 30 days and also has at least one conversation that's outside the estimated time period. For many users, this list of labels will include Starred and Drafts.")
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