Four major and one minor revisions in, Google's Android operating system is seriously looking the business, having evolved into the most popular mobile OS on the planet. Over the years, the operating system's features have developed, the web-browser is faster and more usable than ever before, the OS is now 'butter smooth' and support for new device connectively has been rapidly adopted, however, to this day, many of the little niggles that remain can be found clamouring around Android's Gmail app.
Off the top of this writer's head:
- No ability to schedule active e-mail polling/sync to working/waking hours.
- No ability to zoom
- Unaligned with Android 4.X swipe gestures
- Unable to tweak background colour (not OLED friendly)
- No real support for other e-mail services
We can perhaps forgive Google for not supporting other e-mail services, the application is called Gmail after all, however this has led to OEMs bundling a general Mail application with their devices, which tends to be where development is focused, leaving Gmail several steps behind.
Recently, however, Android Police placed a video on YouTube, depicting an unknown device running Gmail 4.2, demonstrating both pinch-to-zoom and swipe functionality.
It had originally been suggested that pinch-to-zoom had been left out of Gmail amidst Apple licensing concerns, however with the feature present in the standard web-browser and Apple suing the pants off firms for violating far more ridiculous patents, it seems only reasonable that the feature should make an appearance.
The video could of course be an elaborate fake, what do our readers think? Can we hope for a Gmail application with zoom functionality?
