Most of you probably know that I’m not the greatest fan of $Google and I think they’re evil and most of their products suck — there I said it. However, there is one product/service/beta offering that I’m pretty found of and that is Gmail, even though this may be due to a lack of a quality alternative at the moment. What I like most about Gmail is the 2GB plus space it allows you and the very good spam filtering. I’ve also found the search to be extremely useful on more than one occasion — although I’m pretty dubious of $Google indexing all my email.

The Gmail Mobile Application has been around for a while, and I finally decided to give it a go over the weekend and let me tell you I was pleasantly surprised. Installation was a cinch and involved nothing more than browsing to gmail.com/app on my mobile phone and downloading; then installing a java file. The Gmail application opened quickly and immediately resized to fit my phone’s screen resolution. So far I’ve found it to be fast and responsive and you can pretty much take advantage of all the same features that appear in the web client as well as same valued-added mobile offerings such as the ability to open certain file formats within the application. The option to pre-buffer all email body, which is enabled by default, works great and simulates a desktop email program, but can get costly if you receive a lot of mail and don’t want to read everything.

Although Gmail has featured POP access for some time now, so it’s possible to receive email from your Gmail account using a desktop email application or supported mobile device, this new java application essentially makes it foolproof even for Luddites and Stork Margarine Moms. Finally, Gmail becomes accessible to the majority of South Africans who don’t have fixed Internet connections — and did I mention it’s going to be great for the beach this summer?