Google released the update for its mobile Gmail application, significantly increasing the performance and enabling certain useful features for its clients.

The new version allows users to access their mailbox while being offline or when experiencing weak coverage. Users will also be able to write emails while being offline, which will be saved and automatically sent once the connection signal will be strong enough. It enables users to access more than one Gmail or Google Apps email application through the same app, meaning that users will no longer have to use two different mobile apps to access their personal and work emails, as explained by the company’s officials.

“Our focus for this version was to make the experience faster and more reliable,” explained Derek Phillips, a software engineer in Google’s mobile team, through a post in the company’s mobile blog. “We rearchitected the entire client to push all the processing to the background, greatly improve the client-side caching scheme and optimise every bottleneck piece of code we came across,” he added.

Other useful add-ons of the update are its ability to save multiple email drafts and also to use the QWERTY keypad shortcuts to boost the speed of email communications. Another amusing feature is the emoticons enabled for emails, which represents a first for Gmail messages.

The update targets all J2ME-supported phones and also BlackBerry models such as the Curve. In addition to this list, it also provides basic offline access for other models such as Nokia’s N95 and Sony Ericsson’s W910i.