Astra, the upcoming sequel to what was once everyone’s favorite universal messenger, is currently undergoing closed testing within Cerulean Studios. But that’s changing. Development of the app has reached the alpha state, and signups are now open for anyone wanting to get a chance to help Cerulean test Astra into submission. Approved testers will of course have to be involved in the testing community and submit their bugs to cerulean, this isn’t just a preview of some new software.

Read more: Trillian Astra alpha-testing signups

Several years ago, Trillian was the end all be all for Windows messengers. Not the first, but certainly one of the most stylish and attractive universal messengers, Trillian was an instant web-success. Then things started to go wrong. Development was split into a free version and a pro (commercial) version. Both started getting bloated and performance suffered. But, Trillian appears to be making a comeback. With the newest version, Astra, Cerulean Studios are attacking the performance issues by updating the rendering times as well as chasing down the many memory leaks that have been plaguing them for years now. Many new enhancements are coming, including a widget system, support for MySpace Messenger, and many other new features. But enough blah blah blah, go take a look and see if you’re willing to give old faithful another shot.

Read more: Cerulean Studios offers preview of Astra

Google today announced that their Gmail mobile client has gone live! The Gmail mobile client is designed to be as powerful as the web client, allowing users to search their email, easily navigate and compose mail with the minimal of clicks and even allows users to click and call contacts stored in your Gmail contacts list. The client is JAVA-based and runs on hundreds of JAVA-enabled mobile devices already.

Read more: Gmail mobile client goes live