The Iterative Web App - Faster Address Auto-complete and Keyboard Shortcuts

On April 7th, we announced a new version of Gmail for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Among the improvements was a complete redesign of the web application's underlying code which allows us to more rapidly develop and release new features that users have been asking for, as explained in our first post. We'd like to introduce The Iterative Webapp, a series where we will continue to release features for Gmail for mobile. Today: Faster address auto-completion and keyboard shortcuts. --Shyam Sheth, Product Manager, Google Mobile.

At Google we're always looking for a way to do things faster. Today, we're announcing two improvements that will speed up your Gmail for mobile experience.

The first improvement is faster address auto-completion. This means that as you begin typing the first few letters of your friend or colleague's name or email address, Gmail for mobile will quickly display possible contacts. We sped up this process by reusing previously fetched matches in subsequent searches.

The second improvement is that we've enabled keyboard shortcuts for Android-powered devices with a physical keyboard. Now you can use all those familiar Gmail keyboard shortcuts to quickly move through your inbox. For example, if you're reading an email you can press 'u' to return to the inbox or 'n' to move to the next conversation.

To try out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports iPhone/iPod Touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.

Posted by Matthew Bolohan and Andrew Grieve, Software Engineers, Google Mobile