Offline GMail coming to iPhone and Android

Advertisement (Why?)

According to iPhone Buzz, Google is currently testing a "technical concept" which would allow Android and iPhone users to access their GMail accounts whilst offline, bringing their recently announced feature to mobile devices.

VP of Engineering at Google, Vic Gundotra, showed a demo of an iPhone 3G with this capability at the Mobile World Congress this morning, showing a handset in Airplane Mode accessing Gmail. This new feature uses HTML5's AppCache and Database standards, meaning that it will be able to be used on any device that adheres to these standards. This will save time for developers, as they won't have to develop a separate application for each device that will use this functionality. The feature was also shown on the recently announced HTC Magic, and it will also work on Palm's upcoming Pre.

According to iPhone Buzz, it appears to be release ready and full functional, but Google has made no announcements what-so-ever about its release.

Check out a video of Vic Gundotra showing this off below.

(1 reply) #1 +Xerxes on 19 Feb 2009 - 02:04

Doesn't the iPhone already do this? I can access my Gmail "offline" on my Touch, although it is limited. I don't see the video, guess it's blocked (at work).

#1.1 +Techno_Funky on 19 Feb 2009 - 04:40

Xerxes said,

Exactly, ive always been doing that.

#2 chAos972 on 19 Feb 2009 - 02:38

I didn't reailse HTML5 had that kind of functionality, that's pretty huge. Kind of defeats the purpose of gears once more browsers support it I guess?

(2 replies) #3 /- Razorfold on 19 Feb 2009 - 04:04

um what makes this any different from like the mail client on the phone

#3.1 +Frazell Thomas on 19 Feb 2009 - 10:17

Yea it looks like a nice tech demo, but I'm confused on how useful this could be to someone on the iPhone? It would have to be opened regularly to keep up to date since the iPhone won't be able to run it in the background to keep it up to date...

Also, with it being an email client in the browser you have to ask why? All modern smartphones have built in clients that can do as many email accounts as we desire...

#3.2 Magallanes on 19 Feb 2009 - 13:53

the iphone email client lack of ads embedded in the client himself, so Google is earning nothing with those pop and smtp client.

Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!

Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.

Neowin.net