Getting To Know The Upcoming Gmail 4.2 - Revamped Attachments, Better Navigation, And More!

If you haven't heard, we've got an unreleased copy of Gmail 4.2. Yesterday we showed you the major new features: pinch zoom and swipe to archive/delete, and today we've made a few more discoveries we thought you'd like to know about.

As usual, the old (well, current) version is on the left and the new, unreleased version is on the right.

Attachments have been totally revamped. For starters, attachments are now below your message, where they belong, instead of above, like in the current version. Here, in the right image, you can see the message text, but you'd have to scroll down to see it on the left. (Don't worry about the missing Google Talk status. I broke mine. Guess how.)

If your attachments are pictures, they are now big giant thumbnails, which are much more viewable. You also lose the "View" and "Save" buttons on the main screen. So where did they go?

Here they are! You can now pick Save, Save all, Share, or Share all from the menu button while viewing a picture. Gmail also doesn't kick you out to the Gallery anymore when viewing pictures, it has its own picture viewer. Note how the app icon is still Gmail's. I'm not sure what the benefit of that is, but it is different.

The new navigation dropdown now pins a shortcut to your inbox to the top of the list. You can now finally, easily go from All Mail to Inbox from the dropdown. It also shows more items.

Gmail now displays the number of unread items for the current label in the top right hand corner. It used to only do this in the Inbox, but Google has seen fit to put it everywhere. I like it. The menu button is also hiding a new shortcut to the settings for that label. Cool.

Last but not least, the "Message text size" option in settings is now dead. We've got pinch zoom now, though, so who cares? If you have bad vision, there's a system-wide accessibility setting that will increase the text size for everything. The settings background has also changed from white to gray.

That should be everything new in the next version of Gmail. And, oh, we've got some good news! We've gotten permission to release the Gmail 4.2 APK. That will happen sometime today. Stay tuned!

Update: You can download the new Gmail here: [Exclusive] Download: The Unreleased Gmail 4.2 APK With Pinch-To-Zoom And More.