Jay Eye Sea

When mobile gmail (m.gmail.com) first came out, I used iton a Nokia 6680. A brilliant service: it was optimized for a small screen, supported mobile browser numeric shortcuts, and used very little bandwidth. This was a step-change for mobile apps - and finally a real use for my much hyped 3G Smartphone. But for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with data plans and international travel, I didn’t actually use it that much.

Fast-forward to Feb 2008 and I got a Nokia E61 from SwissCom - a great phone, and good data package, so I was in mobile gmail all the time. That’s when I noticed that hyperlinks in emails don’t appear most of the time.

At first I blamed Nokia’s web browser (unjustly it turns out, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable reaction). This week I discovered that you can enter the mobile browser URL into a normal web browser and it will serve up the mobile version rather than switching to the normal www.gmail.com version, which I’m sure it used to do.

It turns out that mobile gmail will correctly show links in plain text emails, but will convert HTML or rich-text emails to plain text - removing hyperlinks along with bold, italic, pictures and colours! You can try it yourself from within gmail, by

1. creating an email with a hyperlink by just typing it in (1st screenshot), and
2. creating an email with a hyperlink using the link icon on the rich text formatting toolbar (2nd screenshot)

Adding a link by just typing it in

Adding a link using the link toolbar icon

And here’s what they look like when you view them at the mobile URL:

The ‘plain’ link shows up OK - it’s been converted from plain text to a hyperlink ‘automatically’ when it was sent, and works fine.

But the link lovingly added with the toolbar button just shows up as ordinary text

I’m at a bit of a loss over this one - I can understand why you might want to strip some text formatting (bold, italic, colours) and images out, but hyperlinks? A browser isn’t a browser it it doesn’t understand hyperlinks. So why do this? I can only assume it’s a bug, but if it’s a bug, it seems major enough that it would have been noticed and fixed by now. Maybe they’re just focusing on getting everything right for Android…

Well until there’s some hardware to run Android, please fix it for the phones that are here already!