Posted by Anna de Paula Hanika, Android Product Marketing Manager

Not only does the just-announced Nexus One have a beautiful display, snappy processor, and five megapixel camera complete with flash and geotagging, but you can also buy it online with or without a service plan. Plus, it runs Android 2.1, which adds a couple of new features to the native Gmail application:

• Quick contact badge: Press the contact status icon within Gmail, and a handy box shows all of the ways you can reply to a contact — including email, chat, SMS, and Facebook.
• Voice input: Swipe the keyboard, then just speak to select contacts or write an email, complete with punctuation. Period!

Nexus One also features the Gmail updates of Android 2.0, including:

• Multiple Gmail accounts: Sync multiple accounts to the same device and switch between them without leaving the app.
• Undo: A handy 'undo' link makes it easier to retrieve messages when you hit archive or delete by mistake. (Note: you can't yet undo send as you can with the desktop version of Gmail).

For more information on Nexus One visit google.com/phone. To learn more about Gmail on this and other Android devices, check out the Gmail page on mobile.google.com/android, or watch this video:

Tuesday, December 01, 2009 7:50 PM

Posted by Darren Lewis, Software Engineer and Jon Kotker, former Software Engineering Intern

In the early days of email, messages were simple text meant to be read on a terminal. But with the growth of the web came the advent of HTML email, and overnight people began expressing themselves through bold and italics, colors and images, and whatever else their creativity inspired.

If you like to use a specific text style for your messages, you’ve had to change the font every time you’re about to start typing out an email. Now, you can turn on default text styling from the Labs tab, then go to Settings and set your preferences just once.

Try it out and tell us what you think. If you live and breathe code, now you can set your default text style to a monospace font. If your life is purple, your email can be, too. But remember: whatever you see is what your recipients will see, so be nice to them and try not to clog the intertubes with ginormous bold italicized red script!

Original Post:

New in Labs: Default text styling

Posted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Ah 2009...turning five, finally shedding that beta label, and adding more than 40 new features. As we wind down after a busy year, here's a look back at a handful of our favorite additions to Gmail.  We hope you enjoy trying them out as much as we enjoyed building them.

• Tasks, onto your phone and out of Labs
• An improved mobile experience, including push Gmail and a complete redesign
• Four new themes to make Gmail sparkle
• Offline Gmail and its graduation from Labs
• Drag and drop labels
• More fast previews, including PowerPoint and TIFF
• Multi-select attachments for faster, smoother file sharing
• A way to eliminate duplicate contacts with a single button
• More storage for less moolah
• Lots of new labs experiments, including undo send, automatic message translation, and "Got the wrong bob?"

On behalf of the entire Gmail team, happy holidays! See you next year.

Posted by Dominik Marcinski, Software Engineer

Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it's no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You've been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we've added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once. To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the "Find duplicates" button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don't want merged), and hit the "Merge" button.


If you've been considering getting all your contacts into Gmail or syncing your Gmail contacts to your phone, now's the time to do it. As we've written about previously, you can sync your contacts to a wide variety of devices (including Android, iPhone, Blackberry, SyncML, etc). So if you were dreading spending hours getting your contacts in order, now you can do it with a couple clicks.

Posted by Maya Moufarek, Regional Marketing Manager

Recently, I reunited with some colleagues in our Moscow office (the same team that brought you this Gmail art video last year) on a set of animated videos showcasing some of Gmail's features: messages grouped into conversations, great spam protection, built-in video chat, offline access, and themes. Some of the humor in these videos may be uniquely Russian — they revolve around a character who imagines what the world would be like if everyday objects worked like Gmail, like this video that compares unthreaded conversations to a mess of laundry:


In case the Russian version is too confusing, we've translated all the videos into English here.

Posted by Jenny Ross, Software Engineer

I subscribe to a lot of really active mailing lists. Oftentimes, an email in my inbox will get dozens of replies before I get a chance to start reading it. If I only have a few moments to look at a particularly long and interesting discussion, I'd like to start reading it then; later, when I have some more time, I'll pick up where I left off. However, if I mark the thread as unread, it will return to its previously read state without updating to show what I just read. When I come back to it, I'll have to search for the last thing I remember reading. If I star the first message I still want to read instead, I might not remember that it needs to be read when I'm in my inbox later (and when I do read it, I'll have to expand lots of messages before I can read the conversation properly).

There's a new feature in Gmail Labs that will help with this. When you enable Mark Unread From Here from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see a new "Mark unread from here" option in the drop down menu found in the upper right-hand corner of messages.


Clicking this option on a message tells Gmail that you want that message to be the first one you see when you reopen the thread later, with all messages after it open for easy reading. So, when you leave partway through reading a long thread, figuring out where to start reading again is easy. Give it a try and share your thoughts.

Posted by Aaron Whyte, Software Engineer

Almost a year ago, we launched Offline Gmail in Gmail Labs. By installing Offline Gmail, you're able to use the normal Gmail interface to read and write mail, search, and organize, even when there's no internet connection. And Flaky Connection mode speeds up Gmail when your connection is slow or unreliable.

Since we first launched in Labs, we've heard from a lot of you who tried Offline Gmail, and your feedback helped us make a lot of improvements. Aside from fixing bugs and making the whole offline experience smoother, we recently added two frequently requested features: an option to choose which messages get downloaded for offline use and the ability to send attachments while offline. Offline Gmail has proven particularly useful for business and schools making the switch to Google Apps from traditional desktop mail clients -- they're used to being able to access their mail whether or not they're online, and Offline Gmail brings this functionality right to the browser.

Now, we're happy to announce that Offline Gmail is graduating from Labs and becoming a regular part of Gmail. If you're already using it, then you're all set. While you'll no longer see it on the Labs tab, you can tweak your settings and turn it on and off from the Offline tab under Settings. If you'd like to get started with Offline Gmail on your computer now, here's how:

1. Click the "Settings" link in the top-right corner of Gmail.
2. Click the "Offline" tab.
3. Select "Enable Offline Mail for this computer."
4. Click "Save Changes" and follow the directions from there.

Thanks for all of the feedback over the last year -- and for putting up with the occasional bug or two. We're going to have a little toast, and then get right back to working on more improvements for 2010.

P.S. We received some interesting pictures in response to our call for photos of people using Gmail offline in our last post. Our favorite so far came from Ugo, who is at a Saharawi refugee camp in south Algeria, where he uses Gmail offline most of the time and connects via a satellite phone to our servers just once a day.

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

Three weeks ago we made extra storage for Gmail and Picasa Web Albums more affordable, and now we've partnered with Eye-Fi to make it even easier to get your photos into the cloud. Eye-Fi offers WiFi-enabled memory cards which make your existing camera wireless, so it's easy to upload photos and videos right to Picasa Web Albums or to your computer -- no cables required. For a limited time, when you buy 200 GB of Google paid storage for $50, you'll get a free Eye-Fi card (a $95 value).

Visit picasa.google.com/eyefi.html to get yours today, and happy holidays from the Picasa team!