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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Mobile Version Of Gmail Becomes Smart With “Smart Links”

Having small screens in mobile devices, it would be many times not much helpful when email contains a long url. Google released that and came up with a new feature called “Smart Link” for mobile version of gmail. Consider a long link such as this Google Maps link:

Not only is the link taking up an unnecessarily large amount of space, but it's not easy to find the address that's hidden in the middle of the link. To solve this problem, mobile version or gmail now shorten the link and automatically convert raw links into named links, which they call "Smart Links". So instead of seeing that long link to Google Maps, you're going to see the link renamed to the actual address:

Clicking on it still takes you to the same Google Maps page, but now the link is much shorter and the important information is more visible!

Here's a list of links that are currently supported :

  • Google Maps address queries
  • Google Maps directional queries (with one destination)
  • Google Sites webpages
  • YouTube videos

Support for more link types will be rolled out soon, such as Google Docs. Note that Smart Links work only in plaintext emails right now.

To try out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports iPhone/iPod touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Isn't that a bit risky, though, to hide the url's domain? just thinking out loud...