1. GMail now does IMAP. This is signficant to me for two reasons: a) it works sweet on my iPhone — read this to see how to set it up, and b) I can now do GMail via Outlook against the same data store…now I’m much more likely to use Outlook as my offline (think “in flight“) email solution.
2. Improved contact manager. Just click on “Contacts“ and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I’m not sure when this shipped but it must have happened very recently (I love it when things are so smooth, you’re not even sure when it happened). Here’s a screenshot to give you a taste:
3. New keyboard shortcuts. I love <ctrl>-s and “m“ (for mute). I’m not sure how new these two actually are but I hadn’t noticed them before. Mute is exactly what I’ve been longing for in some cases.
4. More space. Did you notice that the incremental space counter has sped up dramatically? I now have close to 5 GB of space available to me, which helps significantly because at one point I was getting close to running out of space (now I’m only at 40% of capacity). However, I also recenlty stumbled onto the pricing structure for additional storage. It’s really not that bad — $20/yr for 20 GB of additional storage — I would pay that.
5. Improved speed. Here’s the scoop from The Official GMail Blog:
We have also been fanatical about speed. Even on a fast Internet connection, it can take a second to request and render a new web page, and when you read a lot of mail, these seconds can accumulate to hours waiting for email to load. We’ve spent a lot of time profiling all parts of the application, shaving milliseconds off wherever we can, and figuring out workarounds for some pretty deep-rooted issues with the current browser implementations. Some of the most common actions should be faster now. For instance, we prefetch messages in the current view, so when you open an email your browser doesn’t have to talk to Google’s server; it just displays the message. These techniques really shine on newer browsers and computers. Using an alpha version of Safari 3 on a MacBook, we’re seeing sub-200ms times when opening messages—pretty quick.
Cool beans all around.