Gmail‘s been given a mild steroid injection today. Load up the free webmail service and you’ll see a new look navbar, and dig a little deeper and you’ll see Contacts have been given a good few tweaks too. So what’s new? Read on and we’ll tell you.
Open up Gmail today and you should see a cleaner left hand column, with Mail, Contacts and Task buttons brought into the top, and a Compose Mail button sitting above the inbox, now inside a grey icon.
The big shape up in Gmail is on the Contacts side of things however. That new link means it’s easier to open up, and you can browse through the list with traditional Gmail keyboard shortcuts. You can add new fields, as well as those for titles and suffixes, while the notes field gets much more priority. It’s a nice touch, particularly as Gmail Contacts becomes the address book for many mobiles (Not just Android smartphones, but any that can run Google Sync) – it’s easier to adjust it all here than on a screen the size of a BlackBerry, say.
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We’re actually not sure we like the new look Gmail, if only because all the highlight buttons (All/Unread etc) have been shoved into one inconvenient drop down menu. But the changes to Gmail Contacts appear to have been well thought through and streamlined – and with the ability to add custom fields easily, futureproofed too.
Google says Google Apps won’t be able to see these changes to Gmail just yet, and we’ve verified that this is the case.
Do you like the new look Gmail? Have your say in the comments below.
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