Ever since purchasing my first generation iPhone I’ve had a problem with the speed at which it retrieved Gmail. Sporadically (actually most of the time) my Gmail retrieval would hang for long periods of time – or not retrieve at all.

I tried emptying my inbox. Sometimes that worked. More often than not it did not.

Just today I stumbled across the solution that significantly sped up my iPhone 3G’s Gmail retrieval times. I believe this will also work on the first generation iPhone as well as iPod Touch models.

The trick is to turn on the Google Labs advanced iMap support.

Once you’ve enabled the option in Google Gmail Labs, you then can turn off the synchronization of folders via iMap. This seems to significantly speed the retrieval of email. My iPhone went from lengthy two or three minute retrieval lags to virtually no lag at all!

My iPhone has never been faster and the annoying lags are completely gone!