Gmail Updates: Google keeps adding nifty enhancements to make Gmail an even better and user-friendly application. Yesterday while replying to an email a small message popped up telling me that a new message has been added to the conversation. The popup box gave options to either update the conversation with the new message or just ignore 
it. So no more saving the reply in draft mode to get the updated conversation.
Gmail team also cleaned up the ‘Show Details’ feature, which now shows up in a drop-down mode instead of hard to read inline text before. Another new feature is “Forward All”, which lets you forward all the messages in a conversation instead of just one message. Also the offline chat now works from Gmail too that was previously launched for Google Talk client.
Some of these feature have been not rolled out to the ‘Google Apps for Domain‘ users. Also if you have trouble getting the new features to work, try Shift+refresh in IE and Ctrl+Shift+refresh in Firefox to refresh the JavaScript.
I think steady roll-out of features and integration points from Gmail, GTalk, GCalendar teams has left Yahoo Mail more than year behind in terms of technology. Yahoo’s execution and roll-out of features has been too slow to catch up with the super-fast innovation and roll-out seen from the Google teams. Their mail upgrade has been going forever now and still there is no end in sight. Personally I don’t care much about what Yahoo and Hotmail do right now. They had lost user trust when they had reduced our mailbox sizes to 4 MB and 2 MB respectively. Every time I used to login to my Yahoo and Hotmail accounts, a big red bar used to show that I am running out of space. Everyone knows that had it not been for Gmail, things could have even got worse. Who knows, Yahoo and Hotmail could have resorted to deleting emails as soon as you read them in case you don’t want to reply within 5 minutes. Luckily that day never came ’cause of the free-jumbo-superfast-featurerich-Gmail.
Yahoo IM Phone: Yesterday Yahoo announced the launch of Linksys Dual-Mode Cordless Phone for Yahoo IM with voice. So, users can now make phone calls using the Yahoo VoIP plans without the need to stick to their PC’s. I don’t think Yahoo’s voice rates are the one of the most competitive in the market since Skype and Jajah are giving free out calling till the year end. Skype had also launched similar phone couple of months back. Also, Yahoo IM does not allow you to login from multiple machines simultaneously. I think you would get logged out from the IM on your PC or laptop as soon as you start talking from the phone. So either you can talk or chat, but not both at the same time.
USBCell: Moxia Energy has begun shipping it’s USBCell to US based customers from this week, which was previously being shipped only to UK based customers. USBCell idea is simple and straight forward. Plug the batteries into your laptop or PC USB port to start charging them. No need to look for a charger to plug them into. Downside — Each battery takes 5 hours to charge and usually we have only 1 USB port on the laptop. So if you are in a hurry you are better off with the Duracell 15 minutes rechargeable batteries with the tag-along recharger.
NextAlarm: NextAlarm had introduced free alarm monitoring to anyone in the US and Canada to home and business users. So what’s new about that? Well, if the alarm gets triggered, the customer is notified only by email or SMS or text-pager. After that you need to call-up 911 to save your stuff. NextAlarm is priced at $5 per month that includes unlimited alarm notifications and unlimited e-mail addresses for alarm notification. Idea is great but I think I will stick onto ADT for a bit longer for obvious reasons.
Newsgator Screensaver: Newsgator team is taking its Newsgator Everywhere thingy very seriously. Today they introduced a new Screensaver that lets you read your unread posts for selected RSS feeds from the screen saver. Checkout Newsgator page for more information.
