Once the suggestions turned from a stream into a flood, Google caved and added Tasks (like in Gmail) to Google Calendar. This is a nice addition to GCal for 2 reasons:
We started off the week by reporting that Amazon’s Kindle Store has surpassed over 260,000 books with an exponential growth rate – at least that’s not a reason not to own one.
We took a look at the available VHS to DVD converters and other analog to digital converters (both hardware and software solutions).
We featured a bunch of Google-related news. The latest offering from Gmail Labs is a tiny addition but welcome one – insert images directly into email. Next are the many uses of Google Latitude and last is the news that Google and universal were partnering up on a music video website called Vevo.
Rounding up, we pleasantly discovered that Facebook is
not only attracting younger members. Rock Band fan? Nowhere to put your instruments? Then take a look at the ‘Rock Box’ Rock Band storage box.
Here’s our weekly summary of featured items from Gizmos For Geeks:
There’s a new feature from Google Labs that allows you to ‘unsend’ an email just after sending. Why oh why is the Sci Fi Channel renaming themselves to SyFy?
For noisy environments, you’ll be able to get a ‘throat microphone’ from Sanwa. Home improvement buffs may like the Ultimate Musical Doorbell and wanna-be musicians should take a look at the illuminated fret guitar.
Perhaps one of the more high-end, expensive items this week was the 3G WiFi router for Cadillacs. tikitag which was an item we featured from CES 2009 was renamed to ‘touchatag’ and got some new features as well.
For all of you who crave for faster broadband speeds, VDSL2 might have the answer with the possiblity of up to 500Mbps speeds through simple copper telephone wiring.
Finally, the most important article was that there’s a new virus making the rounds and you should update your AV definitions and security patches ASAP.
Source: Gizmos for Geeks.
Sweet. I’ve been enjoying GrandCentral for some time now, but was wondering like everyone else what Google was doing with it for the past 2 years or so. Turns out they’ve been hard at work improving what was there and adding new features.
First a recap –
What’s new in Google Voice: …
GrandCentral becomes Google Voice – unified messaging, the Google WayRead More »
Oh yeah, you read that right. Let’s say you go out one night, and have a really good time, and then decided to come home and oh send some e-mails. I’ll bet you regretted those e-mails the next day. Wouldn’t it be cool if your e-mail client could stop your drunken e-mailing? Well, a Google employee named Jon came up with a little feature that you can find in the Gmail Labs section of Gmail called aptly enough, Mail Goggles. Love it.
It works simply enough – enable it, specify a time window, and then do some simple math problems before Gmail will let you send that e-mail. To enable, just head into your Gmail account and click on the little green beaker icon at the top of the page, and scroll down to Mail Googles.
The Google G1 phone is now available for pre-order on the T-Mobile network for $179.99. You may be able to get your hands on one as early as Oct 22.
So what can you expect in the HTC handset running Android, the Google-sponsored mobile OS? For starters, a touch screen, a slide-out screen that reveals a full QWERTY keyboard, a screen that displays in both landscape and portrait modes, a 3 Megapixel camera, 3G network and Wi-Fi access.
The G1 will come with a number of apps built-in, yes, all centered around Google applications, such as Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk. It will also thankfully have an IM application that is multi-platform.
Google has also already announced the Android Market which is analogous to the iPhone Store, where you can download and/or buy apps for your Android-based phone.
It remains to be seen how successful Google will be with their handsets in terms of open sourcing the whole Android platform. My suspicion is yes they will, and I won’t be surprised if Apple ends up doing something similar with the iPhone OS within a year. After all, if both Google and Nokia/Symbian are running open source systems and have significant market share because of it, well… you can figure out the rest.
Google sure knows how to light up the news sites and blogosphere – release a brand new Web browser! Called Chrome, it’s Google’s foray into a once-crowded market that is now dominated by just 2 players (at least on Windows) – Microsoft and Mozilla.
Everyone else has reported on and given their opinion, so why not another?! I did download and test out Chrome. I would have been disappointed if I was not impressed by at least one feature of a brand new Google product and the big G did not let me down.
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There’s a new kid on the Webmail block – GMX.com. GMX Internet Services, Inc. claims to have over 10 million Internet mail accounts, and has attracted 100,000 users in the beta testing of their new webmail service. Built with a lot of AJAX features, the GMX interface resembles Outlook and Hotmail more than Gmail or even Yahoo Mail, and sports 5GB of storage.
Here are my initial thoughts where I compare GMX mainly to Gmail as that’s my primary webmail client.
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Even on a recent three week trip to China, I was able to gain Internet access everywhere we stayed, so you’d figure a recent jaunt to the Feast of the Geek, CES 2008, I’d be constantly connected. Well, I was unplugged for 36 hours…
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According to one blogger‘s inside source at Google, the ‘gPhone‘ (not its actual name), or Google smartphone is for real, and could potentially be out in Q1 2008. Here are some of the features that it’s speculated to have: Google Maps with GPS, Google Talk, VoIP, Gmail, Google Productivity Apps, essentially all of the Google Suite. It’s supposed to be based on a modified Linux kernel (sweet!). I wasn’t crazy about the iPhone, although the touchscreen is really nice, and the browser makes surfing the web on a phone painless. However, hand me a Linux-based device that will be hacked to kingdom come, and I’ll jump at that.
There is (has been) a lot of speculation that Google is/isn’t going to jump into the smartphone business, and my take is that they will. Why not? Considering that something like 90% of their income is from online advertising, what happens if that market drops out from under them? They need to diversify, and what better way to get people seeing their ads than having them be connected to their site and apps all of the time?
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