Gmail Mobile

Google recently released Gmail Mobile. Given the buzz around Gmail and the fact that Charlie Schick is wondering what my take is on Gmail, I HAD to take a look a it.

First of all, I had no luck getting Google to send me an SMS invite. Supposedly, anyone with a US mobile phone capable of receiving text messages can have an invitation sent to their phone by visiting this page with their desktop browser. Well, it didn't work for me. I tried multiple times with two different phones on two different carriers (Boost Mobile and T-Mobile). The Google page claimed to be sending SMS's to my phones but I never received them. I contacted Google support and received a reply that:

"We've investigated, and determined that a problem occurred with your
wireless provider. We are forwarding your number to your wireless provider
for further investigation. If you have any questions or concerns, please
contact your provider for more information."

That sounds like a canned response to me and I'm skeptically seeing as it happened with two different phones on different providers and both phones have no problems receiving SMS from senders other than Google. Nevertheless, I've created a ticket with both Boost and T-Mobile - I'll post if this issue ever gets resolved or even explained.

Fortunately, I was able to obtain a Gmail invite from www.highwayman.org, a free site where Gmail users can share their surplus invites. I received my invite within a couple of hours after registering - pretty cool.

Once I got my Gmail set up, I played around with the full desktop version and found it quite impressive. There are plenty of Gmail reviews out there so I won't go into the details of the full Gmail here. But there are several features that make Gmail different than other email applications. These features make the Gmail experience what is and I was anxious to see how well they were carried over to the mobile version. In summary, in Gmail, on the desktop:

• Read emails don't disappear from your inbox until you archive them (deleting emails is discouraged).
• Related emails including replies are grouped into conversations which appear as a single item in the inbox, opening a conversation expands it with older read emails that are part of the conversation displayed collapsed to a single line each above the expanded current message.
• A powerfully search capability makes it easy to find old (including archived email).
• Instead of folders, Gmail has categories which work much like del.icio.us tags.
• Instead of rules, Gmail uses filters to selectively treat incoming mail - forwarding, applying labels, hiding Spam etc.
• Many types of attachments (PDF MS Word and Excel, image files) can be viewed as html in the browser or downloaded. PDF conversion is hit or miss, a third of the PDF's I sent to Gmail displayed as unreadable gobbledygook. PDF's appear as plain text but Word docs (in full PC Gmail only), while losing images do retain their formatting.

Next, I tried accessing the mobile version at m.Gmail.com.

I had mixed success. Gmail mobile requires a WAP2 device with SSL support. That leaves out all the WAP1 phones as none of the xhtml to wml transcoders handle SSL. Even a lot of WAP2 phones seem to have problems with Gmail mobile. There is a syntax error in the Gmail mobile login screen. The page is sent with an application/xhtml+xml mime type rather than text/html so browsers expect the page to be well-formed xml and valid xhtml-mp. The page fails the well formed test as it contains <br> tags - xml requires all tags be closed so <br/> must be used instead on <br>. Among the browsers that error out on m.Gmail.com are the Motorola, Nokia and Sony-Ericsson WAP2 emulators, Opera (desktop, smartphone and mini versions) and Firefox. IE can't deal with the xhtml mime type so it fails too. However many users report it working on actual phones and Google has a list of supported phones here.

If Gmail Mobile doesn't work on your phone there is a workaround. The <br> bug occurs only on the login page. So, do as "minibrand" at the Opera Mini Forum suggests:

"The following workaround worked for me (I got a parse error on the m.Gmail.com page too):
+ open the standard www.gmail.com web page on your mobile and sign in with 'remember ...' enabled
+ go back to the mini start page, without logging out from Gmail
+ open m.Gmail.com and you should go into your account.
(it should skip the problem page and open in m.Gmail directly)."

With the above workaround, most WAP2 phones should be able to access Gmail Mobile.

So assuming you've connected to Gmail, what's it like?

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posted by Dennis Bournique
December 31, 2005 @ 7:38 pm
7 View Comments