If you are reading this blog or following the iPhone apps for Geeks series, then you probably know that there was one missing feature from the GMail mobile that I cried about. This missing feature made me look for alternative better GMail iPhone apps (like GMateMail or iGMail) and even buy one of them.
By now you are probably already asking what’s this feature I talk about: it’s the auto-expanding Compose Boxes (see ☞ Official Google Mobile Blog for a complete description). Basically this feature allows you to write and reply in an efficient and non-frustrating way while using GMail on your iPhone.
Now, if I’m reading correctly that post, it looks like the Google Mobile team is promising for more periodic update, so I hope they’ll get soon to address those frustrating issues in the mobile Google Reader.
Read more articles from the iPhone apps reviews series.
The mobile GMail version is probably the best mobile application for Google products. At the other end of the spectrum is the Google Reader, missing so many features that are almost making it unusable.
Anyways, the mobile GMail is not perfect either. Leaving aside the fact that it is not possible to attach pictures, which would be a nice to have feature, the most annoying thing about it is the small and almost unusable message input box. While you will probably be able to write a first email, answering to an email will be really difficult, as that input box is just extremely small and it completely lacks scrollbars.
Being a heavy GMail user, I’ve been looking for a possible alternative that would basically offer all the GMail goodies (threading, labels, etc.), but also have a better input form for writing emails.
For the last couple of days I’ve been the extremely happy user of such an application: GMateMail, which while using the original interface is addressing exactly these pain points. Plus it offers access to multiple accounts including Google Apps accounts.
Unfortunately, it looks like for the last 24 hours GMateMail is broken as it requires you to login for each action. Considering that this will probably require the release of a new version of GMateMail and that would need to go through the lengthy and painful Apple approval process, I’ve already started to look for alternatives.
And it looks like there might be such an alternative: iGMail. Anyways, except the official description (which as always is talking about how great the app is, but forgets to mention a feature set), I’m not able to find any additional information. So, here are my questions for anyone that gave it a try:
If anyone can provide additional details about this app, I’d be both thankful and happy to update the post.
Update: A Twitter search shows that the GMateMail issue is at least 6 days old, so I was probably lucky to have it working for so long. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any sign of a fix yet. So, are there any other solutions?
