OK, I've only played with this for a bit, but I've got to say that I was pretty disappointed. It sounded better in the WSJ article. The scratch pad taking on Microsoft Office? Huh? I guess that's why journalists get paid the big bucks.
The sidebar opens eight panels for me by default and none are big enough to show me much useful information. Gee it's got weather and stocks. And the Web clips feature seems to auto-ID RSS and Atom feeds from pages I'm ALREADY LOOKING AT and show the feed items to me in a little, tiny window. Uh, that's useful. And the fact that it's watching what I'm doing is, as usual, comforting.
There are much better ways to get the same functionality -- Dashboard, Konfabulator, and Firefox extensions come to mind. All of these systems look much better (well at least Konfabulator and Dashboard do), work much better, and are already platforms, have tons of applets/extensions, have a ton more functionality, etc.
An while I, for one, welcome our new portal overlords, this seems pretty weak for a 2.0 beta product from the big G. Maybe they will add horoscopes next.:)
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The sidebar opens eight panels for me by default and none are big enough to show me much useful information. Gee it's got weather and stocks. And the Web clips feature seems to auto-ID RSS and Atom feeds from pages I'm ALREADY LOOKING AT and show the feed items to me in a little, tiny window. Uh, that's useful. And the fact that it's watching what I'm doing is, as usual, comforting.
There are much better ways to get the same functionality -- Dashboard, Konfabulator, and Firefox extensions come to mind. All of these systems look much better (well at least Konfabulator and Dashboard do), work much better, and are already platforms, have tons of applets/extensions, have a ton more functionality, etc.
An while I, for one, welcome our new portal overlords, this seems pretty weak for a 2.0 beta product from the big G. Maybe they will add horoscopes next. :)