Archive for September, 2009

Google Adds Push Mail to Sync for iPhone, Windows Mobile

In a blog post from the Google Enterprise Apps team, Google has announced that syncing iPhones and Windows Mobile phones with Gmail via ActiveSync now allows users to sync mail as a push account. Until now, users had to use ActiveSync (or Google Sync as Google likes to call it on the server-side) for calendars and contacts and exclude mail from syncing. Then the user had to setup their Gmail account as a separate IMAP account on the iPhone/Win Mo to get their email. It appears that push email is available to both the Enterprise and free personal account customers.

As far as I’m aware, we still have no word on whether Gmail will support some of the more advanced features of ActiveSync the way that Exchange (and now Zimbra 6.0) can. So far, Exchange competitor Zimbra can do things like initiate wipes to mobile devices, lock devices when an incorrect password is entered, and pause (and resume) syncing to the device.

Gmail has differentiated itself from the market, however, as being the only free email provider (that I’ve heard of) that offers push mail, contacts, and calendars via ActiveSync (or other similar way to your choice of device). Others (like Hotmail) aren’t even offering IMAP access to external mail clients to free customers.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 22nd, 2009

Never Deal with Phone Menus Again

I just read through LifeHacker’s 2009 top ten list of the web’s most under-hyped apps and just can’t get over number 2: Fonolo. Most of the other applications are just web apps that perform the same function as desktop applications, but Fonolo seems to stand out among the rest as one of the more innovative and useful applications I’ve seen in a while. The application is really simple (something that seems to make the good ones stand out), but it allows users to call common businesses that utilize phone menus and display the menu visually. Once the services gets through the menus, it connects to the users’ phone to pick up.

In a world where most things are available to us online, there’s a surprising amount of things that one still has to pick up the phone for and this allows consumers to have the convenience of browsing, much like the web, but still be able to get to talk to a real-life person. I can see Fonolo being ripe for the picking from the likes of Google to add to Google Voice as a wonderful time-saving feature. Hopefully we’re not too far from the day where businesses offer such a service right from their website as well, but I’m sure we’re a long way from that day..

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 21st, 2009

Forget Monitoring, Just Check Twitter!

Tonight Facebook seems to be having some issues. It has been resetting connections from my browser and is almost as reliable as my workout schedule. How do I know it’s not just me? I searched Twitter, of course, and seem to have found a significant amount of others having similar problems. At the beginning of this month, Gmail had a fairly major outage and Twitter was alive with comments about Gmail being down as well.

This concept really isn’t all that new, but it’s amazing how much visibility one can have into what’s going on in the world. The last two issues that I’ve experienced with large services, I found out that thousands of others were having problems within moments. Of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg of things that Twitter can be useful for. Being able to see what’s being said about your product all the time is incredibly useful as well. I suppose the system works, however, only until Twitter breaks down and we have to find some out-of-band tool to check on it (which, given Twitter’s track record, we may need that fairly often).

Update: Ha! Just after posting, I had problems logging in to my Adsense account. Guess where the first place I looked for and found others having the same problem? :)

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 19th, 2009

Is Microsoft Supporting Old Products Only When It Feels Like It?

It was barely a month ago that the web development community watched in horror as Microsoft told the world that dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 was not an option. I completely understand and would agree with the rationale here. They released Windows XP with IE6, so a freshly re-installed desktop would be unsupported if they had dropped support for IE6, which is certainly a bad plan. However, that doesn’t seem to be the same Microsoft that we saw this week when they told us that they won’t be patching the critical TCP/IP flaw found in all versions, but patched in Vista.

What really leaves me scratching my head about these two circumstances is that Windows XP is used by far more users than Internet Explorer 6. It’s commendable that they continue to support IE6 even after some very serious push from the community to try and force users out, but Windows XP market share is still extremely high while IE6 market share is waning. Perhaps the Windows team has been a bit busy lately with patching new vulnerabilities being discovered (though disclosure of the last one was pretty irresponsible assuming it really was released publicly first) as well as finishing off Windows 7.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 16th, 2009

Why No Camera On the New iPod Touch?

Today Apple gave its iPod lineup a bit of a refresh with a new version of the iPhone firmware, iPod Touches with larger capacity and a slick new Nano with a camera. The iPod Nano looks pretty slick with its new camera, YouTube/Facebook publishing, and various other new fun features. So slick that I’m thinking that I want one and I don’t really get excited about devices all that much. Problem is, I’d like to run apps and have WiFi.. So I need a Touch.. doh!

I really don’t get it. As far as I understand, they were able to add the camera to the Nano without adding any width to the device. I’m sure there’s reasons that they can’t add the camera without adding width, but I’d gladly sacrifice a little bit of width if I gained a camera. Besides, the iPhone has it. Now Apple’s going to have to come up with some crazy chart like the Windows 7 product comparison chart to decide which model to buy..

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Sep 10th, 2009

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