techno.blog("Dion")

I have been using Gmail on my blackberry side by side the default mail app to see what I like and do not like.

The bulk of what I would like to see are just more quick keys. One thing the Blackberry gets right is that there are a ton of short cut keys to learn, and power users live and breath with them.

Gmail on the web does a good job as the vi of email clients, letting you move around and cause events using keys. The mobile version has many of the same shortcuts but doesn’t seem to have:

• j and k to move up and down in the thread view (different to n and p in a conversation). I don’t want to be forced to mousewheel.
• space to page down (instead it opens the email, which o is already there for)
• t and b: these go to the top and bottom of email content, but what about in the thread view? I want to at least be able to go to the top (bottom is harder with the endless paging)
• m: Mark all as read. I often want to just mark my current emails as read rather than going through each marking them. It doesn’t even let me mark them one by one easily, instead I hit o and esc to read it and go back
• auto download email: one of the nice things about the BB is that the email is there waiting for you. it grabs it all the time. I want a setting to tell gmail to do the same please.
• space in a message: page me down

These are definitely nitpicks, and there are more for gmail in general (filters seem very limited, and you can’t even use a character like ‘[' to filter on? This is a pain when you want to lazily "any subject with [xxxx] is probably a mailing list so label it as ‘List’”) but they would make this user happy.

NOTE: short cuts are particularly useful for mobile users that have qwerty keyboards (BB, Treo, etc). Not as useful for T9 folks.