Google this week announced three updates for its Gmail mail service.

The smallest of these updates is the addition of emoticons to the mix, something many users have felt the absence of given the fact that there are several different versions of emoticons available in Gtalk, which runs while you read and reply to your emails. Following the addition of colored labels to Gmail, Google now brings us animated emoticons so that we can send lots of colorful emails to all our friends. A cheerful update for a Friday.

The next feature (which was actually added earlier in the week), is Canned Responses. For those of you who are so lazy you can’t be bothered to reply to your mail, Canned Responses allows you to have a list of templates that you can send out when you receive mail from certain people. For those of you too lazy to even read their mail, Canned Responses can assign a response based on certain keywords and send off the mail. While this could be useful for certain people or clients when an out of office reply won’t suffice (say for friends or family), the keyword option could be a bit sketchy. You could be surprised how often random words that you have flagged show up in emails you actually might need to read.

The third and possible biggest update this week for Gmail is the release of the newest version of Gmail for Mobile. Users can now enjoy a faster, smoother service from Gmail for Mobile. Gmail Mobile 2.0 comes with J2ME and Blackberry support for nearly all models, so Nokia N95 and Bold users users can now enjoy Gmail on their phone. Users can now manage multiple accounts, work offline, save multiple drafts and QWERTY keypad folk have more shortcuts to work with.

Download Gmail for Mobile by visiting m.google.com/mail