Google Enters the Offline Client Game

      by Wyatt Walter

Google has finally entered the ranks of its email competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft in offering an offline version of its interface. Yahoo! and Microsoft have both offered offline clients for their mail, calendar, and contact information with Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop and Windows Live Mail for some time now and Google has joined in with Offline Gmail. The product is still in Google Labs so it is still experimental, but it is in essense a broser plugin that allows the broser to cache a user’s mailbox and later will allow the user to cache the calendar and update while offline.

What makes this different from a local mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird? Well, two things really. The first is a consistent interface. Windows Live Mail (the local client) looks just like Hotmail in the browser. The same goes for Zimbra Desktop and so on. A local mail client is not going to have a consistent interface which can be a pain should users be forced into using the client offline. The second benefit is the lack of a need for a third-party plugin. Mail certainly doesn’t need to have a plugin since it will go over POP or IMAP, but not the other data in your account. Even Microsoft Outlook cannot interface directly with Hotmail for contacts and calendars. If one wanted to sync their contacts from Gmail to say Thunderbird, they would have to install a third-party plugin to do so. The offline clients allow users to have the “syncing” ability without needing to worry about compatibility with the services.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 29th, 2009

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