Trevor Morris

I have tested the new Gmail “basic HTML view” on my mobile phone using Opera’s Small Screen Rendering for handheld devices. I wanted to test the application in a real word situation so I was surrounded by distractions and in a “mobile environment”.

The application was only usable with Opera’s small screen rending technique as with this turned off there were horizontal scrollbars present. You can toggle the HTML version at the bottom of the main Gmail page and you are presented with a similar layout to the full application. However, this type of layout doesn’t work on a mobile device but the SSR technique linearises the page nicely.

Although I only used the application to check for new emails and read them, I found it pretty easy to use. I was able to quickly go to the inbox after moving through only a couple of links. The list of email titles were a little jumbled up because of the lack of available horizontal space, but it wasn’t too difficult to work out.

After clicking an email to read, the application refreshed the page. This refreshing is different to the behaviour in the full application mode. The page doesn’t automatically jump to where the email conversation starts, however it is easy to scroll down to. With Opera’s SSR technique the email content was presented in an easy to read format.

A downside of this version was that when viewing an email, all the headers, which are hidden by default in the full application, are displayed. This just means more information to scroll through to reach the important content and IMO I think they could be left out.

Improvements: I would suggest that when the page reloads it jumps straight the email body. This would save the time and hassle in scrolling to the content.

Finally, the Gmail help center mentions a few features that are unavailable on this “lite” version, these are:

• Filter creation
• Settings
• Spell checker
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Address auto-complete

However, I didn’t even try to use these features so I can’t comment on their lack of presence.

Overall, I would use this service again. However, I would much prefer its integration to either built in e-mail reader or an application which can be installed much like the official Gmail Notifier.