{"id":57,"date":"2005-12-31T19:38:52","date_gmt":"2006-01-01T03:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=57"},"modified":"2020-09-23T19:44:31","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T02:44:31","slug":"gmail-mobile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/57\/","title":{"rendered":"Gmail Mobile"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google recently released Gmail Mobile. Given the buzz around Gmail and the fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/cognections.typepad.com\/lifeblog\/2005\/12\/gmail_mobile.html\"> Charlie Schick is wondering what my take is on Gmail<\/a>, I HAD to take a look a it.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s to my phones but I never received them. I contacted Google support and received a reply that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;We&#8217;ve investigated, and determined that a problem occurred with your<br \/>\nwireless provider. We are forwarding your number to your wireless provider<br \/>\nfor further investigation. If you have any questions or concerns, please<br \/>\ncontact your provider for more information.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/gmail7.jpg\" alt=\" Image 2 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/gmail1.jpg\" alt=\" Image 1 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><br \/>\nThat sounds like a canned response to me and I&#8217;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&#8217;ve created a ticket with both Boost and T-Mobile &#8211; I&#8217;ll post if this issue ever gets resolved or even explained.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, I <strong>was<\/strong> 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 &#8211; pretty cool.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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:<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/gmail3.jpg\" alt=\" Image 4 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/gmail2.jpg\" alt=\" Image 3 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Read emails don&#8217;t disappear from your inbox until you archive them (deleting emails is discouraged).<\/li>\n<li>Related emails including replies are grouped into <em>conversations<\/em> 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.<\/li>\n<li>A powerfully search capability makes it easy to find old (including archived email).<\/li>\n<li>Instead of folders, Gmail has categories which work much like del.icio.us tags.<\/li>\n<li>Instead of rules, Gmail uses filters to selectively treat incoming mail &#8211; forwarding, applying labels, hiding Spam etc.<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;s I sent to Gmail displayed as unreadable gobbledygook. PDF&#8217;s appear as plain text but Word docs (in full PC Gmail only), while losing images do retain their formatting.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Next, I tried accessing the mobile version at m.Gmail.com. <img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/gmail5.jpg\" alt=\" Image 6 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/gmail6.jpg\" alt=\" Image 5 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/>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 &lt;br&gt; tags &#8211; xml requires all tags be closed so &lt;br\/&gt; must be used instead on &lt;br&gt;. 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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>If Gmail Mobile doesn&#8217;t work on your phone there is a workaround. The &lt;br&gt; bug occurs only on the login page. So, do as &#8220;minibrand&#8221; at the <a href=\"http:\/\/my.opera.com\/community\/forums\/topic.dml?id=116423\">Opera Mini Forum<\/a> suggests:<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/gmail8.jpg\" alt=\" Image 8 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/gmail4.jpg\" alt=\" Image 7 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The following workaround worked for me (I got a parse error on the m.Gmail.com page too):<br \/>\n+ open the standard www.gmail.com web page on your mobile and sign in with &#8216;remember &#8230;&#8217; enabled<br \/>\n+ go back to the mini start page, without logging out from Gmail<br \/>\n+ open m.Gmail.com and you should go into your account.<br \/>\n(it should skip the problem page and open in m.Gmail directly).&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>With the above workaround, most WAP2 phones should be able to access Gmail Mobile.<\/p>\n<p>So assuming you&#8217;ve connected to Gmail, what&#8217;s it like? <img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sayni2.gif\" alt=\" Image 9 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sayni1.gif\" alt=\" Image 8 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><br \/>\nIt&#8217;s actually quite similar to desktop Gmail. The first thing you see is the mail in your inbox (first image).<\/p>\n<p>Related messages are grouped into <em>conversations<\/em> just like on the desktop. Unfortunately, I don&#8217;t think conversations scale well to mobile. You have to scroll down a screen or more past the the stacked titles of old read messages in the conversation to reach the new unread message at the bottom (second image).<\/p>\n<p>Scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the page reveals links for other functions (image 3) .<\/p>\n<p>Contact <em>Groups<\/em> are supported.<\/p>\n<p>If you stored phone numbers in contacts, you can place a phone call from the contact screen (4th image).<\/p>\n<p>Google&#8217;s trademark search is there too but not the options of the desktop version to search <img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sayni4.gif\" alt=\" Image 11 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 1%;\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/sayni3.gif\" alt=\" Image 10 \" width=\"136\" height=\"176\"\/>specific fields (From, To, etc.) or to search for mail NOT containing the search string or to restrict the search by date or to only those emails with attachments.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of attachments, I attached MS Word documents, PDF&#8217;s and JPG&#8217;s to emails and sent them to Gmail. Two out of the six PDF&#8217;s appeared as total garbage on the phone (sixth image) and in Gmail in Firefox on Windows. The problem PDF&#8217;s were almost entirely text. The other PDF&#8217;s were converted to plain text with all images, fonts boxes and table borders stripped out both on the phone and the PC. At least you are warned :) (image seven). The Word documents also had images removed but while text formating, fonts and tables were retained in desktop Gmail, on the phone they appeared as plain text. JPG&#8217;s (eighth image) looked great, resized to 120 pixels wide.<br \/>\nIf you have a WAP1 only phone there are at least two ways you can get access to Gmail.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There is an open source project called <a href=\"http:\/\/sourceforge.net\/projects\/gmail-mobile\/\">Gmail Mobile<\/a> (last four images), a web service written in PHP which provides a WAP1 interface to Gmail. It&#8217;s quite full featured with access to your Gmail Contacts and Gmail&#8217;s search functions. For maximum security you can download the PHP code from the above address and install it on your own web server. If you don&#8217;t have a web server, there is a public copy (hosted by <a href=\"http:\/\/sourceforge.net\/forum\/message.php?msg_id=3398264\">Neerav<\/a>, one of the developers) at Gmobile.sayni.net. The open source Gmail mobile is actually more full featured than Google&#8217;s. It has support for the following Gmail features (none of these are supported in the &#8220;official&#8221; Gmail mobile):<br \/>\n&#8211; All the search options in desktop Gmail.<br \/>\n&#8211; The vacation responder.<br \/>\n&#8211; Creating and enabling filters including conditional forwarding.<br \/>\n&#8211; Setting up and canceling unconditional forwarding of all mail.<br \/>\n&#8211; Creating labels.<br \/>\n&#8211; Adding, deleting and editing contacts and groups.<br \/>\nI prefer the way OS Gmail mobile handles conversations. Instead of stacking old messages above the current message as Google does, the OS Gmail puts them on a separate screen, accessed from a link below the current message. One area the Open Source app is inferior to Google&#8217;s is attachment handling. You can only view attachments that your phone&#8217;s browser has native support for. WAP1 browsers typically don&#8217;t support any file types other than wml, wbmp and sometimes text or another image format such as jpg.<\/li>\n<li>If you have the option to enable POP access on your Gmail settings page (I do but I&#8217;ve heard not all Gmail accounts have this feature available yet) you can use <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20200216025747\/http:\/\/mail2web.com:80\/wap\/\">mail2wap.com (wml)<\/a> a full featured mobile web based application that can access any POP3 or IMAP4 mail server. Mail2WAP is a service of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mail2web.com\/\">Mail2Web.com<\/a> a well established service with an excellent <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20090419205248\/http:\/\/services.mail2web.com:80\/About\/Policy\/PrivacyPolicy.asp\">privacy policy<\/a> I&#8217;m working on a full review of Mail2WAP.com which I should be posting in the coming week or two<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In summary, Gmail mobile is a decent WAP based email if you are already a Gmail user and it works on your phone. Gmail as a desktop service has a lot of things going for it. In addition to the innovative UI, Gmail offers features like POP access, forwarding and that huge mailbox limit that other free services don&#8217;t. On the other hand, I wouldn&#8217;t switch to Gmail based solely on the features of mobile version. It&#8217;s a beta, so given Google&#8217;s track record, I do expect Gmail Mobile to get better and better.<\/p>\n<p>Look for my upcoming reviews of mobile Yahoo mail, Hotmail and Mail2WAP &#8211; all three of which have advantages over Gmail Mobile in at least some areas.<\/p>\n<p>Content: <img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/blue-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"20\" height=\"16\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/blue-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"20\" height=\"16\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/blue-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"20\" height=\"16\"\/> Usability: <img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/red-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"20\" height=\"16\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/red-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"20\" height=\"16\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/images\/red-star.gif\" alt=\"*\" width=\"20\" height=\"16\"\/><br \/>\nGmail Mobile: <a href=\"http:\/\/m.gmail.com\">xhtml<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;t work for &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/57\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21424,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/21424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}