Cody Taylor

Google just announced a new service for pushing Gmail contacts and Google Calendar updates to mobile devices. For iPhone and Windows Mobile devices Google is using Exchange ActiveSync with some limitations due to the beta nature of the service, but it’ll also work on many other devices that support SyncML.

The growth of Google’s Gmail service is accelerating and, if current trends continue, it could surpass Windows Live Hotmail by the end of this year.Between December 2007 and December 2008, Gmail’s number of unique monthly visitors in the United States grew 43%, from 20.8 million to 29.6 million, according to ComScore.

Gmail has been slowly but surely rolling out cool new features ever since they started Gmail Labs. If you haven’t taken advantage of the fruits of Labs, here’s a look at 10 Labs features you should enable.

As of this week, Gmail has reached perfection: You no longer have to be online to read or write messages. Desktop programs like Microsoft Outlook have always been able to access your old mail. There is a certain bliss to this if you’ve got a pile of letters that demand well-composed, unplugging the Internet can be the fastest way to get things done

Google is pretty fast-moving, as company cultures go, rolling out new products on a regular basis. And yet its popular Gmail service is only just now getting around to providing offline e-mail access, a feature that open-source Zimbra has had for nearly two years.

javipas writes “Google developers have announced a new feature part of Gmail Labs that everybody was waiting to see realized. Offline Gmail will allow users to have a partial copy of its Gmail account on their PCs, and access their messages while being offline. The magic of Google Gears comes to the rescue, but the process will not be complete. The syncronization will update the online and offline copies, but Google will use an algorithm that will determine the messages downloaded on each sync (the first being the most important) based on several parameters that point out that message’s relevance. This measure will save the process from downloading pieces of information not quite valuable. US and UK english users can enjoy this feature through the Gmail Labs section.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of Gmail’s most requested features – offline support – is now available in testing. In other words, you can now use Gmail without an Internet connection, just like you can with desktop mail clients like Outlook.

Significantly increasing the utility and competitiveness of its Web-based e-mail service, Google is enabling an experimental ability to read, write, and search Gmail messages even while not connected to the network.