Sunday, October 21, 2007

Gmail mobile app 1.5

I just deleted Gmail mobile 1.5 from my cell phone, keeping version 1.1.1. The new version (1.5) is way slower, as mentioned here. Startup and shutdown times are noticeably longer. Two possible factors:
  1. The file was about 3x larger and might take longer to load into memory (though I don't really know much about the memory hierarchy of phones, so this may be bogus). The new version does have a bunch of new features (draft saving, etc.) so the new bloat might be warranted.
  2. When starting up the new version, it displayed a list of emails immediately. The old version displayed an empty list and fetched the emails, so it looks like the new version might have cached emails locally. This might explain the slow startup and shutdown times. However, considering that usually there is at least one new email when I check Gmail from my phone, caching the titles of emails from last run is not really a savings.
The weirdest thing is that Google claims here:
New! Our new Gmail version is even faster and uses less data than before.
So maybe it's just my/some phones?

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