HOW TO: Use Gmail for iPad on Your Computer

As soon as Apple iPad available, Google announced a new Gmail interface specially designed for tablet computers (read: iPad).

The Gmail for iPad is a 2-pane design. The left is the list of your emails with excerpt; the right is the email message body. It looks similar to Apple’s official Mail app for iPad.

Though Gmail for tablet is not designed for your desktop or notebook. You can edit your web browser’s “user agent” info to fool Gmail to think that you are using an iPad.

The Apple iPad safari’s user agent string is:
Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

FireFox users: Install User Agent Switcher Firefox extension to modify the user agent string.

Google Chrome users: There’s a User-Agent Switcher for Chrome extension but I can’t get it to work on Mac. If you are using Chrome on Windows, you can edit the Google Chrome shortcut and add the following string to the end of Target field:

-user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10″

Done. You are good to go. Visit http://gmail.com/ for your Gmail for Tablet.

Let us know if you have gotten it work and how do you like the 2-pane Gmail user interface.