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Google Launches Mobile Mail
lazy_hp writes "Google has launched mobile phone version of Gmail. The service automatically optimizes the interface for the phone you're using and also 'Lets you reply by call to people whose phone numbers are in your Gmail Contacts list'. Technewsworld has a story on this. From the article: 'Gmail is now a kind of hub for Google ... GoogleTalk and a range of personalized services are all tied in together through Gmail registration. The more registration data collected by Google, the more relevant search results and ads can potentially be.'"
I tried it on my mobile but it is unable to open it. Try opening http://m.gmail.com/ in opera.
XML parsing failed: mismatched tag (Line: 27, Character: 439)
I lost my signature... help!
"Analysts noted that like all Web-based services, Gmail has technically always been accessible from Web-ready mobile phones. But the Web version was often difficult to read on all but high-end mobile devices, with the browser window on smaller handhelds only displaying a part of the actual Web page."
"'This is mobile e-mail for the rest of us, who have normal or tiny screens,' said Kelsey Group managing editor Greg Sterling."
That's sounds really great for users -- that could be a truly decisive feature, for those who need email access on the road, but for some reason don't already own a blackberry.
Also, is there anyway that MicroSoft can beat back the Google threat on the mobile front, based on the fact that they make the OS that many of these phones use?
It seems that if there is a browser, Google can somehow deliver services to it. So the fact that Windows is on many of these phones won't mean much. I wouldn't put it past Gates or Ballmer to crippled the browser if they thought it would help though -- but that would really be cutting off their testicles to spite their penis. Or however that saying goes.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Maybe Google's recent buy-in of AOL will facilitate some GTalk-AIM integration to consolidate chat services to better combat Yahoo and MSN. Course, I'd rather Google stay out of those wars and make a client that could communicate with all 3 natively, but that's me.
I have (or had?) a Google Mail and Orkut account, which four days ago they closed down. God knows why, I've had the email account around a year, and the Orkut account around 3 months, but I've rarely used them. I've maybe sent 5 email from Gmail, and used Orkut for around 30 minutes more for curiosity than anything else.
Anyway, tried to get logged in to Google and couldn't. I've absolutely no idea why they'd decide to bar my account. Emailed the address they gave, had an auto-response back and instructions to reply if that didn't help. Replied I did, and I'm still waiting.
If this had been my primary mail account, I'd have been *pissed*.
For all these services sound the business, I'm reminded now why I run my own IMAP server. Functionality may be basic, but I 'own' my emails and run SquirrelMail so I can get at them via the web if needs be... Ad-free.
If the choice is between fewer features, but knowing my email is mine, I'll go with the first option any day.
Just wonder *when* Google will get back to me...
In this case it was probably a sensible choice. There are phones out there that only support the XHTML mobile profile or XHTML basic, and while they'll attempt to render normal XHTML documents they don't have a "tag-soup" parser available to try to render normal HTML. All of the latest phones have browsers capable of rendering normal pages (Opera with its small screen rendering, for example) but I think Google is also catering to the previous generation where XHTML support was just hacked on top of the WML (WAP markup) support using the existing XML parser.
If you are somehow able to log in, you will see that there is no beta tag anywhere. One of the first products from google that is not a beta or they forgot to add the tagline.
I lost my signature... help!
Here's a review with screenshots as seen on a BlackBerry 7100g.
Google just released the specifications to their audio extensions ("Jingle"), and GAIM is working on integrating it, which means that it's not impossible that it'll find its way into the "plain Jabber" features, at which point no doubt other Jabber clients will start to implement it as well. That sounds likely, at least, and it'll mean you won't have to use Google Talk unless you want to.
There's no doubt in my mind that Google Talk is to get dramatically more open and more features. I think what they've done so far is dip their toes in the water, and with the release of the Jingle specs and source code (where copyright goes back to 2004 - I don't think they're likely to drop this) they're really saying "OK, let's do this" and getting some very nice leverage from the community in the process.