San Francisco — Back in April, Google unveiled a nifty new version of Gmail for Apple’s iPhone and Android-powered devices. On Wednesday, the search company intorduced two most remarkable updates to the mobile version of Gmail, speeding up things that includes faster address auto-complete and keyboard shortcuts for Android and iPhones.
Now users of Android and iPhones too can enjoy the performance of mobile phones, with the latest improvements to the service–keyboard shortcuts and address auto-completion; are the two time-saving features that desktop Gmail users have been enjoying for years.
According to a post at the Google mobile blog: “The number one improvement is faster address auto-completion. This means that as you start typing the first few letters of your friend or colleague’s name or email address, the Gmail for mobile will instantly display possible contacts.”
At Google we are always exploring for ways to do things faster. “We sped up this process by reusing previously fetched matches in subsequent searches,” Google wrote in a blog post.
The nifty auto-completion feature on the other hand, is available to everyone and is quite a time saver. Nevertheless, the auto-completion only works in the “to” field when typing a new e-mail though, and does not work on Gmail’s search like you are able to do on the desktop variant by using the Gmail labs add-on.
Now you can use all those familiar Gmail keyboard shortcuts to quickly move through your inbox. For example, if you’re reading an email you can press ‘u’ to return to the inbox or ‘n’ to move to the next conversation.
The second, and possibily a more graceful, improvement is that of keyboard shortcuts, for now enable only for Android-powered devices with a physical keyboard (such as the HTC G1), will now have access to this feature. The keyboard shortcuts (obviously) do not work on the iPhone.
Another important thing to note is that these new features are only available in the English version of Gmail mobile. Google has not said if, or when, they will make their way to other localizations of the service.
To check out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports the following: “iPhone/iPod Touch OS 2.2.1 or above,” as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.