With iGoogle, you can personalize your homepage with the information on the web that’s most useful and relevant to you. You can check email, watch videos, catch up on the latest news, check the weather, and more. One of the most common iGoogle requests we’ve been hearing is to update the iGoogle Gmail gadget. Because the Gmail gadget has to share space with other gadgets on the screen, the Gmail experience can be limited to an area not much larger than the size of a business card. Since we’ve already built an experience optimized for small screens with Gmail for mobile, we decided to adapt the mobile web version for iGoogle and are now rolling out an updated gadget.
The new Gmail gadget is pretty similar to the mobile experience — it's fast, looks good in small spaces, and includes popular features like search and labeling. By default, it appears in a minimized window (shown above); if you expand it into canvas mode by clicking on the maximize button in the upper right hand corner, you get the two pane view until now provided only on tablet devices (shown below). Going forward, the Gmail gadget will be updated with new features in tandem with the mobile edition.
We’ll be rolling out the new Gmail gadget over the next couple weeks. If you’re already using the gadget, it will update automatically. If you’re not, you can add it to your iGoogle page here. Keep in mind that the new gadget currently requires a WebKit compatible browser, such as Chrome or Safari.
[ http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/new-and-improved-gmail-gadget-for.html ]