Google Play now hosts the updated Gmail app for Android, which adds some much awaited features from its ICS counterpart to Honeycomb. The update adds swipe to move between newer and older conversations, tap to access Recent labels, set custom notifications for individual labels and sync the last 30 days of messages so you can read and search messages faster both online and offline. For Android 2.2 and 2.3 users it adds a new Labels API which can be accessed by third party developers, something that went missing when the Gmail updated to version 2.5. Head on over to the Play Store to update to the latest version if it hasn’t been updated automatically.

Gmail’s intervention did not sit well with me and as I have been reminded again & again, I may have been a tad bit too hard. Well that’s passé, we now have a new ad for you and its hilarious. Its Microsoft’s attempt to highlight its superiority over Google. Head on past the break for the scoop and the “unofficial” video.

Gmail wants you to do an “Intervention” for all of your friends who are not using it as yet. Its these smug campaigns that make my stomach churn, sure its clever and the folks over at Google are “really” brilliant ( every possible pun intended ), but do they need such a campaign? Keep reading to know how you can help your friends “switch”.

To all those who never bothered, GMail used to allow 10,000 contacts to be stored in your account. That’s going to change now, you would now be able to store more than twice that with 25,000 contacts. More after the break.

Notice the time it takes after you hit the “Send” button and it takes forever for the mail to be sent. What ? You haven’t noticed that ? You wouldn’t be the first ones. But that’s what Google is trying to eliminate. Keep reading on how you can save on those precious “couple seconds”.

Today, the search giant pulled off a prank on its ever so cherished Gmail users, by introducing the Gmail Motion feature. Users of the Gmail service were greeted with a notification on the Gmail homepage supposedly introducing “a new way to interact with Gmail – using your body!”

First of all, this is not a hoax. Google’s Gmail web email service experienced a glitch which reset thousands of accounts, deleting potentially years worth of correspondence. Google said that the issue affected less than 0.08 percent of the  Google Mail database, but with around 200 million users, that’s still around 160,000 accounts hit by the issue.

As we already know Google is continuously working. Engineers at Google don’t sleep or take a break they just code and code to make our lives simpler. Such is the dedication of a consumer oriented organization. Anyways that’s besides the point. If you look closely the interface to Google search has changed a bit with a new theme for the top menu, gradients and shadows. The settings moniker has now been replaced by an icon and today we noticed it has transitioned into GMail as well. That means the new interface is available throughout all Google products. We know you must have missed it, well we like to poke around the finer details as we like to say.