About a month ago, Google began rolling out a refreshed styling for Gmail on the web to its Workspace users, with Material You-esque buttons and shades of blue in the default theme. Today, they’ve announced that this new theme is rolling out to everyone. Oh, they also teased a new Gmail tablet app coming later this year.
In the short blog post, Google talked about the new Material You theme (see it here) that you should see shortly, along with the integrated experience they first showed off earlier in the year. The integrated experience takes Gmail, Chat, Spaces, and Meet, and puts them all in the same tab to let you dance between without opening new tabs or windows. This is what it looks like.
If you don’t like the look of that integrated experience, Google says that you can keep your current layout and that you don’t have to switch. If you happen to have Chat enabled in Gmail, then yeah, you might as well turn it on. It really does offer handy switching between Google’s various communications apps.
In addition to the new theme, Google is pushing its improved search through Gmail to everyone too. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but the basics are that Gmail’s search should be more accurate, and offer “Better and more contextual contact suggestions with intent matching,” as well as “Personalized suggestions based on historical interactions.” This is all thanks to updated machine learning models from Google.
And finally, in a bit of a tease, Google told us today that we’ll get “an improved experience for tablet users” later this year, as well as better emojis, new accessibility features, and “a whole lot more.” They didn’t show off the tablet experience, but Google has been spending time in recent months getting apps ready for the latest big tablet push for Android.