It’s been a busy week for googlers with the release of many updates and new product announcements, none more important that turn by turn navigation for Android 2.0 which threatens the entire GPS industry.
Google Social Search A lot has been made of twitter’s search engine and how it can enable real time search, but what of Google’s attempt to provide real time search? It has long be known that google is indexing social networking sites, but now it has launched an experiment: Google Social Search which wants to help you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. You need to be logged into iGoogle:
Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called “Results from people in your social circle.”
Seems like this could be quite fun and useful to those who are following lots of people.
Google Docs Long a favourite of mine, google docs are maturing nicely. While not being the most powerful office application, docs does do one thing extremely well – available anywhere with a net connection in other words at work, at home and on my iPhone! Docs now sports a standardised look and feel across all of the Google Docs editors.
One of the features of docs has always been the ability to share and export your data, but now google have taken this feature a step further: “Convert, Zip and Download” making it even easier to work on your google docs in alternative environments.
Turn by Turn Navigation with Google Maps Google Maps has allowed users to get directions via their mobile phone for sometime now, but with the release of Android 2.0 Google have entered into direct competition with the likes of TomTom and Garmin. As Google states:
This new feature comes with everything you’d expect to find in a GPS navigation system, like 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone’s Internet connection.
Currently only available in the US and on the soon to be released Droid, but is certain to be rolled out to other devices and countries in the coming months. Will Apple allow it on the iPhone?
The question for me is this: Will this drive users to purchase an Android phone?
Synchronize your contacts. Get your Google contacts quickly and easily to your phone. With Sync, you can have access to your address book at anytime and place that you need it. Get calendar alerts. Using your phone’s native calendar, you can now access your Google calendar, and be alerted for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration. Always in sync. Your contacts stay synchronized whether you access them from your phone or from your computer. Add or edit contact information right on your device or on your Google account on the web.
Now I can sync my iphone’s contacts directly with my google apps contacts and calendar. This saves me the £69 annual fee Apple want for MobileMe.
I did run into a problem, mainly that I couldn’t get m.google.com/sync to recognise my apps login – it kept defaulting to my other google account. The solution was to remove my apps email address from the google account. As I had my apps account as a secondary email address on my @gmail.com account when I logged in at m.google.com/sync, it just took me to my @gmail account. Suffice it say that once I removed the apps account from my gmail account it all works flawlessly!
The service itself works very well and if you’ve tried MobileMe or another exchange service you’ll not be disappointed.
Next step, push email? Who knows, but as I’ve got fetch set to 15 minutes I feel like I already have push email, it’s certainly fast enough for me.
Gmail users have been able to use the “labs” features for a while now, but “labs” had been broken for google apps users, that is until…ok not quite today, but sometime last week!
We still do not have themes, which are coming, but all the other cool features now work, including calendar view and tasks.
This upgrade of gmail really makes it a powerful tool, and a viable option to any desktop client. If you are a windows user and have installed chrome, then gmail could actually function like a desktop client. This is made possible by gmail operating inside it’s own browser window and outside of the general browsing expereince.
I’m a big fan of the google calendar and now you can view upcoming events inside gmail, but a lab feature might just be the making of gmail – tasks. It really is simple, working in a similar way to Chat, you just click on tasks and create a to do. That’s it.
“To enable Tasks, go to Settings, click the Labs tab (or just click here if you’re signed in). Select “Enable” next to “Tasks” and then click “Save Changes” at the bottom. Then, after Gmail refreshes, on the left under the “Contacts” link, you’ll see a “Tasks” link. Just click it to get started.”
The folks behind gmail really do keep coming up with great new features and this is just another reason why you should give it a try.
Like many Nokia users I’ve long hankered after the gmail app for java enabled phones to work with google apps for your domain. Finally google have pulled their finger out and transferred the java app to GAFYD. It is exactly the same as the normal gmail app and you can run them both on the same phone.
They have released this in a quiet fashion. I can’t see the benefit in that as surely they want to entice more business users to their wonderful gmail platform. They already have a blackberry app and iphone users are able to make use of the ‘mail’ application which enables use of IMAP.
So why do you need this app? I like the look an feel of the app, the fact that its not memory intensive and that it retrieves your email pretty quickly. It’s only for java enabled mobile phones such as my N95 and those google apps users. To try it for yourself, head to m.google.com/a from your phone’s web browser.
I’ve been using google apps for over a year now and recommend it to all my friends. It provides email, google talk, google calendar, google docs, start page and goolge page creator all for free. Best of all you can bring your own domain to the service.
Google Apps brings together essential services to help your business, school, group or family communicate and collaborate more effectively. These services are powerful, easy to set up, require no maintenance, and you can get them for free. Everything is unified by the Start Page, a central place for your users to preview their inboxes and calendars, access your essential content, and search the web. Administrators can choose to deploy a mix of the communication and collaboration products listed below.
So what are the benefits over another provider such as hotmail?
You can have your own personal email address e.g. me@ctideas.co.uk, your own site e.g www.ctideas.co.uk, your own corporate calendar. All of this with the knowledge that you own the domain name and can switch out of the service at any time.
Even if you just use the email service, gmail is far superior to all other online providers and with applications like prism you can use gmail like a desktop application.
You can also bring your own domain to blogger and utilise google apps as well giving you the perfect combination of applications and website for no cost! What more could you want.