It is interesting to see GMail advocates saving a few seconds a day by using this and that features of GMail, while itself getting slower and slower over the time. I find myself stupid to wait 10 seconds just to load up GMail to quickly look up something. Why I am wasting these 10 seconds loading up a webapp when 99.9% of the time I am using my own computer? You say running a desktop email client with GMail IMAP? The…
Gmail loads within 1-3 seconds for me. Not only that, I VERY, VERY rarely close my browser, not even once a day if I can help it. So my mail is always available for me. Priority Inbox is amazing, as well. In regards to iPhone: Simply get an Android phone. Flawless Gmail/GoogleApps integration; native support for colored labels, calendar, etc. I wouldn't clal it half-baked IMAP, more of, half-baked clients that don't…
I actually keep Chrome running all the time just for GMail. My main web browser is Opera. Chrome's drag & drop support for attachments also helps. I used to use Firefox with Gears specifically for GMail, but that doesn't seem to work very well anymore (and Google have abandoned it with no replacement as yet).