Technologizer

Wow, two USB drive items:

Ars Technica reviews USB drives.

A USB drive for backups.

Switching to Gmail made easy.

512GB SSD notebook from Toshiba.

Vodafone banishes international roaming charges.

Destroying Microsoft Office: surprisingly difficult.

AT&T bans (and emulates) SlingPlayer.

More e-readers to choose from.

Is Gmail having spam problems?

Sony loses a billion bucks.

Sorry this is kinda late-ish:

Apple: cornering the flash market?

Bluetooth hits the big 3.0.

It’s Wall-E as a PC.

Time Warner caps broadband use.

Ten worst operating systems ever.

Gmail figures out time zones.

4GB Eye-Fi cards start shipping.

Moxi box adds media features.

I’d love an interplanetary vacation:

Word creator returns to space.

Windows 7 download page: oops!

Google and Mario: finally together.

Ads take over Meebo chat.

Firefox readies a security fix.

The president is tweeting again.

Birthday present coming for Gmail.

Coming soon: Conficker activation. Greeeaaat.

Twitter business model: more hints.

I’ve officially given up trying to keep pace with each and every feature Google adds to Gmail, but this one looks neat: There’s a new Gmail Labs option that enables in e-mail viewing of Flickr and Picasa photos, YouTube videos, and Yelp reviews. Gmail notices links to this content, and simply embeds it in your message so you don’t need to click away to see what a friend has sent you.

Google says it’s interested in talking to other companies with services that could be embedded into Gmail–and it would be pretty neat if the idea was extended to just about any sort of content that anyone ever links to in an e-mail…

Let’s get newsy, shall we?

Details on Windows Mobile store.

Three new Nokia music phones.

Gmail is bigger than YouTube.

Google cuts off free texting.

In-flight Internet ramps up.

Analyst thinks Snow Leopard’s lagging.

Europe gives Microsoft an extension.

PlayStation gets NBC Universal content.

Xbox 360: Worth a million?

Chinese hackers rip off iTunes.

A pig dock for iPod.

What’s up, ladies and gents?

Safari 4 is blazingly fast.

Google explains yesterday’s Gmail outage.

…and Gmail users get phished.

Google joins European Microsoft tussle.

Is your congressperson on Twitter?

Intel says thin is in.

AMD demos six-core CPU.

A big Photoshop bug fix.

Microsoft’s stock isn’t so hot.

Google updates Internet 6 Toolbar.

Roy Blount wants Kindle cash.

Samsung writes a Memoir (phone)

Nokia music phone hits stores.

Will the Kindle go international?

Another roaming-charges horror story.

Adobe patches up Flash vulnerabilities.

When I hit the sack early this a.m., Gmail was working fine for me. I was one of the lucky ones, apparently: During the wee hours in the U.S., many users of Google’s free e-mail service encountered an outage that lasted for two and a half hours, according to the Official Google Blog. (Why Google acknowledged the glitch on that blog and not at the Official Gmail Blog, I can’t say.)

Gmail outages are nothing extraordinary: I wrote about one major one last August, and a hiccup a couple of weeks ago. And it’s pretty darn common in my experience for Gmail to fail to load–I’m used to it, and just try again until it works. But is the service any flakier than your average Web site? I dunno. As one of the most-used, most-essential services on the Internet, Gmail is under the biggest of microscopes: When it misbehaves, millions of people take notice, and a major crimp is put in their work. Even if it’s actually more reliable than the average service–which it might be.

Google has apologized and says it isn’t yet sure what happened: I’d love to see the company follow up with a post discussing the outage, its cause, and the company’s response. I’m curious, for instance, whether there’s a single explanation for the multiple problems that the service has had in the past few months.

Meanwhile, I’m feeling Pollyannish about this and other major Internet outages: Somebody up there is reminding us that when you give up software for Web-based services, you run the risk of losing access to your data. Even when that data is in the hands of the single company that knows more than any other about delivering reliable services to millions of folks all at one time….

Did you notice Gmail’s outage?

Gmail: Down. Then back up.

David Pogue likes Kindle 2.

Want Office 14? Try 2010.

Happy birthday to Steve Jobs.

A $99 plug-PC.

Intuit: We weren’t bullying Mint.

Vudu sells high-definition movies.

A $200 Android app.

No Atlantis in Google Earth.

Microsoft retracts layoff-payback demand.

Most iPhone apps quickly bore.

Finally, a Hannah Montana PSP.

Hitachi buys storage startup Fabrik.

Wanna hear this morning’s news?

The Pre will have games.

Dell attacks Psion’s “Netbook” trademark.

iPhone turn-by-turn GPS.

Yelp accused: Suppressing negative reviews?

Dismantling 17-inch MacBook Pro.

$50 for unlimited phone calls.

Google demos iPhone offline Gmail.

Dell debuts Mini 10 Netbook.

Google Street View case dismissed.

Lenovo making jumbo-sized netbooks?

Sprint loses a million customers.

I may be more excited about this than I am about offline Gmail access: Google has made a minor change to Gmail’s user interface that makes it–for some of us, anyhow–a far more appealing service.

Here’s the new Gmail menu bar:

What’s new are the “Move to” and “Labels” items. The latter simply moves the ability to apply a Label to an e-mail into its own menu, which makes it easier to get at the command. (Until now, you’ve had to burrow to the bottom of “More actions” to get at Labels.)

But “Move to” is the addition I’m so enthusiastic about: It lets you apply a Label and move an e-mail out of your inbox into Google’s archive with one click. Essentially, it duplicates the functionality that every other e-mail client on earth provides by allowing you to plunk an e-mail into a folder, thereby filing it away by subject matter and getting it out of your way. Kinda amazing that Google didn’t let you do it until now. (You’ve had to apply the Label and move the e-mail to the archive in two distinct steps–in theory not a biggie, but extra work is extra work. I’ve tended to ignore the problem, which means my inbox is bursting at the seams.)

Google has also introduced keyboard shortcuts and auto-complete functionality that let you label and move messages without touching your mouse; I’m not that much of a shortcut guy, so I’m less jazzed up about these. But some people will be very happy, I bet.

Unlike Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, I don’t think Gmail has reached perfection. And it won’t until it either improves the threaded-conversation interface or makes it optional. But between features that Google launches as Gmail Labs options (such as offline access) and ones it just rolls out for everybody (like the new Label interface), the company is improving Gmail at a dizzying rate…

A couple of months ago, Google brought a simple but effective task manager into Gmail, courtesy of Gmail’s Labs proving ground for new features. Now it’s brought the feature to the iPhone, using a Mobile Safari-friendly interface:

The desktop version of Google Tasks emphasizes simplicity and speed over features; the iPhone one (which you reach by visiting http://gmail.com/tasks) is even more basic. I wish that it, like the desktop one, were integrated with Gmail itself–when I’m in Gmail on the iPhone, I’d like to be able to bop quickly into Tasks, and to be able to instantly turn an e-mail message into a task.  (On the iPhone, the two services are sepearate and unrelated.) You also can’t indent tasks on the iPhone.

But Tasks for Gmail is snappy and useful–and it’s especially welcome given that the iPhone still has no native task manager. For now, though, I’m sticking with the iPhone version of Remember the Milk. It’s part of RTM’s paid Pro service, which runs $25 a year, but unlike Google Tasks, it brings all the richness of its full-blown Web version to the iPhone. And I like supporting Remember the Milk, a very small company that consistently makes worthwhile products and does interesting things (like supporting offline access via Google’s Gears) before larger companies like Google get around to doing them…

The Official Gmail Blog bears good news this afternoon: Gmail’s “Labs” experimental-feature proving ground is adding offline access, letting you read and send e-mail even when you don’t have a live Internet connection. Once you turn it on, you can choose between an online mode, an offline mode, and a “flaky connection” one that behaves as if you were online but synchronizes mail in the background as possible.

The blog post goes to pains not to raise folks’ expectations too high: “Offline Gmail is still an early experimental feature, so don’t be surprised if you run into some kinks that haven’t been completely ironed out yet.” And truth to tell, Gmail already plays nicely with e-mail clients that support POP and IMAP, so it’s already easy enough to use Gmail even when you can’t get to Gmail. But I’m still looking forward to trying out the new feature (which hasn’t been enabled in my Gmail account yet, although Google says it should show up shortly).

Offline Gmail uses Gears, the Google technology for offline browser access that Google Docs also takes advantage of. Docs uses Gears to provide a pretty skimpy subset of the online version’s capabilities–you can only edit word-processing documents, and lose a lot of features–but Google’s blog post says “Our goal is to provide nearly the same browser-based Gmail experience whether you’re using the data cached on your computer or talking directly to the server.” (One question which the Google blog post doesn’t appear to answer: Can I download every kilobyte of the gigabytes of e-mail that sit in my Gmail account to my hard drive, so there’s truly no distinction between Gmail’s online and offline flavors?)

Gears is an exciting piece of technology, but it seems safe to say that it doesn’t make building offline apps into a cakewalk: It was introduced back in May, 2007 and there are still only a handful of services (from Google or anyone else) that take advantage of it. At first, I assumed the launch of Gears meant offline Gmail was imminent; then I forgot it might even be a possibility. And now I’m pleased to see that it’s been in the works all along.

At the pace that major Web services are figuring out how to go offline, I think it’s possible that Internet access will get close to pervasive before offline access can be assumed. Once you can get on the Net from an airplane or the boonies, you might only care about offline access for those rare moments when your connection (or Gmail itself) has temporarily conked out. Even then, it would still be handy…

Gmail Labs, Google’s proving ground for new Gmail features, is piling on new stuff at such a dizzying pace that it’s hard to keep track of everything. Some, like the Breathalyzer-like Mail Googles, are enough to make you wonder whether that Google policy of letting engineers devote 20 percent of their time to personal projects is such a good idea after all. Not so, I’m happy to report with tonight’s new feature. Gmail now offers Tasks–aka a to-do list–and they’re such an obvious feature for the service’s bag of tricks that I was momentarily surprised when it dawned on me that it didn’t already do them.

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Gmail is rolling out a new feature today: Voice and Video Chat. The bad news–for me, not you–is that it isn’t showing up for me yet when I log into Gmail. The good news? I happened to be visiting Google when the news broke, so I got an in-person demo. (They say that it’ll be available to all Gmail users by the end of the day.)

The feature looks cool, and it’s exceedingly straightforward. When you’re in Gmail, your contact list will show a little green camera icon next to any buddy who has a Webcam, is online, and has installed the Gmail Voice and Video Chat plug-in (which works with IE 7, some versions of IE 6, Firefox, Safari, and, of course, Chrome). Click the icon, and you get a chat window with video in the botton right-hand corner of the Gmail interface. (You can also blow it up to full-screen mode.)

Here’s Google’s demo:

I haven’t used Gmail for chat much; this is a reason to give it a try…assuming that I can get the folks I’d like to chat with to install Google’s plug-in, that is.

STOP THE PRESSES! The big news in tech this morning is that Gmail has introduced a feature I’m surprised it didn’t have already: emoticons. Lots and lots of emoticons. In two styles: squarish-headed and roundy-headed.

Here they are:

That’s a total of 148 emoticons, some of which are animated. (And yes, the last one in each set is…er, a pile of crap: I didn’t know that Google had a slightly off-color sense of humor, and I’m not sure if I’d want to be presented with that emoticon each time I wanted to insert a simply smiley, frowny, kissy, or weepy into my e-mail.)

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I’m typing this in Firefox on an HP Mini-Note netbook. In fact, I’m doing everything in Firefox on the Mini-Note at the moment, because I’m engaged in the experiment I call Operation Foxbook, in which I spend a few days trying to go cold turkey on desktop applications and my fancy MacBook in favor of working in a manner that’s as close to purely Web-based as possible.

How’s it going so far? Not bad, but not entirely free of bumps. A few notes on the Web-based applications I’ve been using:

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