Gmail adds support for six Indian languages on feature phones

Google is warming up to Indian audiences, and how. The search engine giant has added support for six Indic languages in Gmail for feature phones. Starting today, Gmail will support six languages on feature phone browsers: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. To choose or toggle between any of these languages, you need to head over to the Settings tab on Gmail from your browser.

“Indian culture is diverse, with more than 100 languages and thousands of alphabets used every day. Depending on where you are, you might hear anything from Gujarati to Bengali and Tamil to Urdu. If you’re a speaker of these languages and use a feature phone, communicating is about to get a little easier,” Ian Hill, Project Manager for Google Localisation, wrote in a blog post.

Six new Indian languages added to Gmail for feature phones

Google clearly wishes to be able to reach out to as many individuals around the world as possible, and serve its user base in a language that they are most comfortable with.

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The clout of smartphones may be growing at a breakneck speed in India but feature phones, owing to their affordability, still rule the roost here. Providing support for regional languages and other similar features will not only make life easy for feature phone users in India, it is sure to gain Google more fans.

Google also released an update for its Android and iOS apps today. The Gmail app for iOS has been updated with the ability to swipe left or right to move between emails; you won’t have to return to the inbox each time to switch between messages. The update also allows users to carry out actions on multiple messages quicker.

Selecting an email in the inbox now enables an edit mode on the app. Once in edit mode, users can tap on the emails to select them and then choose to either archive, delete or select more options from the new actions bar. Alternatively, they can select Cancel at any point to quit the edit mode. There are also a bunch of performance improvements and bug fixes.

As far as the Android update goes, those using devices running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and later can now reply to their emails, delete them or archive them right from the notifications panel without having to launch the app. Those with devices running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and up can now make quicker searches, even without an Internet connection. Google has doled out performance improvements to those using Android devices running version 2.2 and up.

Earlier this month, Google announced a design refresh for its Gmail mobile web app and Gmail Offline. The new design will be based along the lines of the Gmail for iOS app, a design that a lot of users like and appreciate.

While Google did not elaborate on what exactly has been changed besides the look and feel of the page, it said the Gmail app revamp for the iPhone and iPad from December last year formed the basis of this change. A couple of the most important aspects of the iOS facelift were improved search and integration with Google Calendar, which will also be a part of this revamp.