Gmail Web App & the iPhone
Last week, Google announced an upgrade to its Web-based Gmail service for users of the iPhone and Android-powered devices. The new service has an easier-to-use interface, loads and searches e-mails faster, and has the ability to check e-mails even without access to a wireless signal.
I am not against web applications for the iPhone. I think it’s perfectly legitimate if the application is done right. The new version of the Gmail web app for the iPhone is a great example of an application done right. The application is fast, unless you’re on the Edge network like yours truly, and in general the usability and functionality of the application is perfect. What I believe the application lacks is the ability to notify end-users when they have new mail. As a result, the end-user has to either keep checking the Gmail web app for new emails or if they have the iPhone mail application setup to fetch Gmail on a certain interval then they can use the iPhone mail notification to load up the web app. Both ways are pretty counterintuitive and kludgy at best. What I hope Google does is take advantage of the new notification system in the 3.0 firmware to notify end-users when they have new email. I assume they could leverage the notification service by creating a dummy application which holds their Gmail web application and then attaching the Apple notification service. I think that would be quite deece.