GMail Users Report Speed Boosts And Better Contact Management
At Google’s recent analyst day event the company reportedly announced that the rumored GMail 2.0 is coming soon and now some users are seeing a link to a “new version” in their GMail accounts. Among the changes are a significant speed boost that comes from a Javascript rewrite and a much improved contacts management screen. Google has yet to make any formal announcement about the changes.
So far the features haven’t been enabled in my account, but judging by the screenshots and reports trickling in, the new contacts management system is the most notable new feature. It also appears that your contacts list has broken out of GMail into a standalone app that integrates with other Google services, which could be another step in Google’s social networking scheme.
So far I can’t tell if the contacts app has any added developer features that would allow third-party apps to synchronize with it (something high on the list of GMail’s most requested features).
Early reports suggest that the new GMail interface is also significantly faster than the current version with some fancy message pre-fetching going on in the background. While I haven’t played with it firsthand, it sounds a lot like the pre-fetching that happens in Google Reader.
Other changes include some mild interface tweaks, an option to import photos directly from Picasa, and a new option to quickly create a filter based on the currently selected message.
If you don’t see the new features, you’re not alone. The link some people are seeing leads to this page: https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2, but if your account hasn’t been enabled it doesn’t seem to help. As with most Google upgrades it would seem that the new GMail features are rolling out slowly across the service.
[via Google Blogoscoped, which also has some screenshots of the new features.]
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