As Google is moving everything it can to match its new Material Design philosophy, it is natural that Gmail would also get updated – and it has been. It isn’t just a major update, but a major usability one for Androids with Lollipop.

Gmail 5.0 will now not only handle your Gmail but all your email. Whether it is on outlook, yahoo, or other providers, you can change it with a single swipe or just hitting the account drop down.

A redesign for appearance is also in the works as you’ll see in the video below that makes Gmail look much nicer. This doesn’t appear though that it will be coming out until the final release of Lollipop as they want everything else updated first.

For those of you who are wondering what the Material Design philosophy is, its Google’s design and development philosophy which advocates unification of things into a single underlying system that works across all platforms and device sizes. It is supposed to work with all modes of input such as touch, voice, motion, mouse and keyboard to allow for maximum flexibility.

Motion is another key part of the Material Design philosophy as Google believes it is a key part in empowering the user. Additionally it focuses and has simple but effective feedback for them to see and react to.

There are many principles within the Material Design philosophy such as accessibility, how animation is supposed to work, how styling with icons, typography, imagery and more should all add to be simple but informative. The principles of layout that Material Design is supposed to adhere to are descendants form the world of print design such as baseline grids and a common structural grid across all pages. This allows for devices of all sizes to quickly adjust to what is there, scale properly and cleanly and make UI development considerably simpler. It also makes it easier when changing applications because they are all designed with a similar philosophy in mind on how to arrange them and organize information for the user to interact with.

Obviously this only covers things google designs and there is a lot more to it. They have posted a visual presentation and layout of it here: http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html

As for that video you were promised, here it is showing you what Gmail 5.0 looks like