Google Launches Mobile Mail

lazy_hp writes "Google has launched mobile phone version of Gmail. The service automatically optimizes the interface for the phone you're using and also 'Lets you reply by call to people whose phone numbers are in your Gmail Contacts list'. Technewsworld has a story on this. From the article: 'Gmail is now a kind of hub for Google ... GoogleTalk and a range of personalized services are all tied in together through Gmail registration. The more registration data collected by Google, the more relevant search results and ads can potentially be.'"

Comments

Ummmm...

[Vivek Jishtu]

I tried it on my mobile but it is unable to open it. Try opening http://m.gmail.com/ in opera.
XML parsing failed: mismatched tag (Line: 27, Character: 439)

Re:Ummmm...

[Vivek Jishtu]

I said Opera 'cause I thought they were using WML but I guess they are using XHTML. Even if you try it out in firefox you should get the same error :) Someone forgot to add a / in br.

XHTML not a bad choice for mobile

[Nurgled]

In this case it was probably a sensible choice. There are phones out there that only support the XHTML mobile profile or XHTML basic, and while they'll attempt to render normal XHTML documents they don't have a "tag-soup" parser available to try to render normal HTML. All of the latest phones have browsers capable of rendering normal pages (Opera with its small screen rendering, for example) but I think Google is also catering to the previous generation where XHTML support was just hacked on top of the WML (WAP markup) support using the existing XML parser.

Review with Screenshots

[davemabe]

Here's a review with screenshots as seen on a BlackBerry 7100g.

Re:And better their services can be

[wootest]

Google just released the specifications to their audio extensions ("Jingle"), and GAIM is working on integrating it, which means that it's not impossible that it'll find its way into the "plain Jabber" features, at which point no doubt other Jabber clients will start to implement it as well. That sounds likely, at least, and it'll mean you won't have to use Google Talk unless you want to.

There's no doubt in my mind that Google Talk is to get dramatically more open and more features. I think what they've done so far is dip their toes in the water, and with the release of the Jingle specs and source code (where copyright goes back to 2004 - I don't think they're likely to drop this) they're really saying "OK, let's do this" and getting some very nice leverage from the community in the process.

Re:Bah, no WAP

[dapendragon]

Incorrect. Works with WAP on my Siemens SL55.

Gmail mobile is late.,

[csshyamsundar]

Actually long before the launch of Gmail mobile., there is a service called Gmail Wireless

They have a lite version where you can access Gmail without ads.

The wap version where you can access Gmail via any WAP enabled device.

Im comfortable with these services., as a matter of fact Gmail lite from gmailwireless.com loads 100% faster than original GMail.com., Best of all you dont have any Crazy Ajax stuff that sucks my FireFox's Memory.

-CS Shyam Sundar

--
It is my job to corrupt young people with the contageous, infectious idea of individual freedom.

Long passphrase!

[Inda]

It's times like this I wish I'd chosen a shorter passphrase with less symbols. I truly hope m.gmail.com 'remembers me'. :)

Very old, very cheap, Siemens MC60 on the Tescos O2 pay-as-you-blow network (UK) works perfectly. This is free for me by the way; does anyone else pay for GPRS on Tescos O2?

Normally when I try and surf the web on my phone it looks a mess, important bits are missing or the phone runs out of memory because the page is too large. Gmail did not suffer from any of these problems.

1. The interface is typical Google clean.
2. Large emails, like 'eBay Item Sold: Mini...' emails, are split up into smaller pieces with a 'Page 2 of 5' link at the bottom. No more out of memory problems

I didn't try anything else out because this fits my needs perfectly.

The question on my lips now is: why has something like this taken so long to get right?

Re:They'd lock me out

[Sime208]

Sorry, to clarify, I shouldn't have said 'closed down' in my original post. They'd disabled my account. The message I get when I try to sign in is "Sorry, your account has been disabled. If this should not have happened, please contact our user support team at accounts-support@google.com."

Re:Doesn't work on ROKR = iTunes phone.

[Snap E Tom]

The "crap" is CSS and JavaScript.

And if you look at the list of supported phones, you'll see that the Rokr is not on there.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answe r=30596&topic=8303

Re:F Google/Gmail!

[moro_666]

i haven't noticed any kind of spam in my mailbox because of the gmail invitation ...

i think you're a bit overreacting, there are zillions of ways to find out your email, mostly just massive spamming on random addresses (i see that in my server log every day, mails coming in on god knows who's name, but there have definitely never been users like that in my server).

get a decent spam filter. spamassassin works fine for me, it blocks bogus senders from turkey and all other sorts of spamm 'homies' from which i don't want e-mails anyway :)