GMail Mobile!

Finally GMail has launched GMail Mobile, so that you can access your gmail account from a cellphone.

I've been using gmail lite to do this, but I've never been really happy with it - I wasn't sure of the security, given that it's going through a 3rd party app, and I could never figure out how to actually read my email. I could see my inbox, and see who the emails were from, but not the subject line or the contents.

GMail Mobile solves all this - you can read, star/unstar, archive and read archived mail (all or by label); you can send new emails, you can do pretty much everything you can do via web gmail except (as far as I can tell) apply labels to emails, and send out invites.

The only problem I have with it is as much a problem with my phone (a Motorola v300) as with gmail. The url is http://m.gmail.com, but you get redirected before ending up on the login page, and at this point the url is really long and has an even longer query string attached to it. Now on my phone, there are 3 ways to store a url: set it as the default page to go to when you open your browser; enter it in the "go to url" field - next time you choose "go to url", it'll remember the last url you went to, although of course if you then change the url you'll lose the previous one; and bookmark it by holding down the menu key when you're on the page.

Method 1 is okay, but not great, since it doesn't appear in my list of links. Method 2 is pretty crummy, since I'll lose the url if I want to enter another one. Method 3 would be the best, and is the way I normally do it, but the phone only supports urls up to a specific length, and of course by the time I get to the login page the url is now too long.

So the phone is at fault, for not letting me manually enter a url into my web shortcuts list. But gmail is also kinda at fault for munging the url so much before you even get to the login screen, given that it is supposed to be a mobile service.

But other than that, gmail mobile is exactly what I've been looking for since I realised I could use gprs on my cellphone :-) Now if only msn would create msn messenger mobile, and I could get away from using a 3rd party app for that too.....