The basic HTML view of gmail has no latency hiding abilities of any kind. It is much slower for every action, and it gets worse the slower your connection is. If you have a high bandwidth, high latency link like "4G" mobile service, ordinary Gmail is almost certainly better.
If course if you have something like GPRS then basic HTML is just the thing.
https://mail.google.com/mail/h/
It approximates the first Ajax/DHTML interface that Gmail introduced when it launched in 2004.