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Inbox by Gmail is big news right now. Regardless of whether you are using Inbox or not, the chances are on at least one of your social network streams have been inundated with a number of people requesting invites. You see, Inbox is at the invite only status and only the select few have had the opportunity to try out the new email client from the Gmail guys. That said, invites have been somewhat free-flowing over the last week and so the userbase is expanding, albeit gradually. Well, its only been a week since the new email client landed and it seems Google is already rolling out its first update. This hasn’t officially hit the Play Store yet although you should see the update landing soon(ish). So what changes can such an early update bring? Well in short, not much. And especially if you are not running on Lollipop. With Android 5.0’s final preview being released it is not too much of a surprise that this roll out is occurring, although it does seem to be highly Lollipop orientated. Therefore some of the changes are only noticeable on Lollipop devices, which at present largely seems to be Nexuses.
Either way, here’s what seems to be on offer. The new update brings with it some minor cosmetics changes. The first is the integration of the action bar with the status bar. In short the action bar now incorporates the color of the status bar so basically when you are in the ‘Inbox’ folder the status bar turns blue matching the action. When in the ‘Done’ folder the status bar turns green matching the action bar and so on. However, this is one of the Lollipop only changes and if (like me) you are using any other device then your status bar will remain black. The second notable change is the slide out action panel. Now when you slide out the action panel, it covers the action bar completely. For those that didn’t notice before the update, when you pulled the menu from the left hand side of the screen the menu would sit underneath the action bar. Now it covers much more real estate and occupies the action bar almost completely (see the image below). This update works on both Lollipop and non Lollipop devices. The last notable change (which personally is quite useful) is you can now literally scroll between multiple email accounts. Before the update you had to click on your email address bar (on the pull out menu) and then select the secondary email account. Now you can just place your finger on your email address (where you profile picture is) and swipe right and you can move between email accounts. Of course, this is only useful if you have more than one email account registered but if you do it is much easier than before. Again this works on both Lollipop and non Lollipop devices.
As mentioned although the update has been released today it has not officially hit the Play Store yet. But thanks to the guys over at Android Police you can now download the APK and sideload to your device. Click here to head straight to the APK download page. If you do download the update then let us know what you think. Otherwise, keep an eye out for the update via the Play Store.
