Every day I check on 7 different Gmail accounts. Both personal and work-related, I have to keep an eye on them. On the desktop I use Mailplane, which is a must-have application that wraps Google’s Gmail web UI around a Cocoa native interface for the Mac, and adds a lot of features to it. If you haven’t tried it yet, go get Mailplane right now.

On iOS we don’t have anything like Mailplane. There’s Mailroom, but it’s not as rich or powerful as Mailplane and it’s only for iPhone. I use Mailroom, but I’d like to be able to do more stuff with it and have a full-featured iPad version as well.

So I’m forced to either keep on switching between accounts on Google.com (not a chance in hell), or use different apps on the iPhone and iPad to enjoy this useful “easy multi-account” feature. Like I said, I use Mailroom on the iPhone; on the iPad I’ve been using MailWrangler and Mailboxes for months, but I think I’ve found something that’s faster, equally powerful and free.

MultiG is a simple app for iPad that lets you switch between regular Gmail accounts and Google Apps ones, it’s got a lightweight and fast integrated browser and it even comes with Instapaper support.

I can’t even remember how I found this. I was browsing the App Store looking for “Gmail” apps and it popped up buried under hundreds of apps for push notifications. MultiG is free and universal for iPhone and iPad, and it does one thing: it allows you to enter as many Gmail accounts as you want and switch back and forth between them. You can open links in the built-in web view (which is pretty fast, although the window isn’t fullscreen) and send them to Instapaper.

So why did I switch from MailWrangler anyway? MultiG is faster. While MailWrangler and Mailboxes took 20-25 seconds to switch between my personal account and the Google Apps one, MultiG takes less than 10 seconds, and it doesn’t return any errors at any time.

Is it Mailplane for iPad? No. But it’s fast, and it’s free. Give it a try.