I’ve had the iPhone for a few months now, after using Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Phone 7, and Android. Android obviously had excellent integration with Google’s services such as GMail and Google Talk. The transition to the iPhone took a little time, but I’ve gotten a lot of things to work pretty good. One thing I noticed the other day was when I would supposedly delete my emails from my phone, they weren’t going into Trash in GMail, instead, they were going into All Mail.

There are a few ways you can setup GMail on the iPhone. You can use the IMAP way, which will basically just give you email, no contacts. You can also set it up as an Exchange account, which will let you sync your email, contacts, and calendars. Here is Google’s walkthrough on how to set it up via Exchange.

Now, if you have multiple calendars in GMail that you want to sync, you can visit m.google.com/sync using Safari on your phone, login with your account, then click on your iPhone. You should have a list of your calendars that you can check to sync to your phone.

Now to the point of this article. If you want to actually delete items (move them to trash) instead of archiving them (move them to All Mail), there’s another check box on this screen that says “Enable ‘Delete Email As Trash’ for this device”. Check that box and scroll down to save.

Voilà! You’re good to go now!

Google has been updating a lot of their applications lately, but the one that jumped out at me first was Gmail!! If you use Gmail and have an Android phone take a look  at what I found over at PhoneScoop:

Among the positive changes is the ability to turn off the pushing of mail except for priority mail. This will help save battery life and enable quicker access to the important stuff.

You can also customize the tones of mail according to the folder they fall in, very nice for prioritizing what you need to read without even having to look.

Another really cool option is the ability to show contact images, mostly glam, but really cool, like looking at an SMS listing!!

Now….the bad….To be honest, the only bad thing I have found so far is the fact that third-party notification apps won’t work now.  So you can’t have an unread count on the main screen with apps like SMS Unread Count. Minor I know, but if you have a good theme going on this may be a bit of a downer for you!

Gmail users….what do you think? Will this help save precious battery life on your phone or just add to the cool look when showing off to friends?

Sources:  Phone Scoop  Google Mobile Help  Android Market