That would mean if you have a Tmobile G1, except for minor patches, it’s as good as it’s going to get.

The G1, the first phone based on Google’s open source operating system, was always quirky. It’s physical keyboard was nice — not as good as the Blackberry, but nice. The overall phone has a clunky feel that seems almost more like a breadboard or a lab prototype.

More about this topic, including an underwhelming denial by Tmobile, on AndroidandMe.

Personal note: I have been using a Tmobile G1 since last November but the decision to upgrade was made for me by my 2-year old last week when he tossed the G1 from the bedroom window. It didn’t bounce. I chose to upgrade to a Tmobile My-touch, the next generation Android phone. It doesn’t have a physical keyboard but seems much more polished than the G1. In other news, Sandra’s iPhone didn’t bounce either. Now she also has a Tmoble My-touch.

I use them both every day, but I’ve never been happy about how I get articles I want to save from Google Reader into Evernote.  My solutions have been either pulling up the actual web page from Google reader and then clipping either text or the entire article from the page or trying to highlight text within the reader and clipping it directly to Evernote, both seemed awkward.

The answer is simple.  While in Google Reader you can send articles via email and every Evernote account has it’s own email address that allows Evernote to capture emails that you wish to keep. So I’ve  started happily reading article in Google Reader and then emailing them to my Evernote account. Very simple and very cool.  The command for emailing from Google Reader is letter “e”.

Me? Kind of slow, but eventually I figured it out.

Your Evernote email address found on Settings Tab of Evernote website

Entering “E” while reading articles in Google Reader opens an email form, just enter your Evernote email address and send.

Oh, yeah and if the term “Ubiquitous Capture “  sounds overly pompous, it’s from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology for the place where you can trust that you can put everything important that needs to get done — it can be a notebook.

The reason I ask, is Google sent a team into Times Square in NYC to ask about browsers and found that only 8% of the folks interviewed actually knew what was a browser. Most seemed to confuse browsers and search engines.

Now this was probably a pretty unscientific sample but also probably fairly typical. I’m not sure Google’s point in this exercise but it comes off a bit like a sequence of Jay Leno’s “Jay Walking”.

Related articles

• Google Asks Common Man “What is a Browser?” Common Man Has No Clue [Video] (mashable.com)

While to call me a developer would be a gross misuse of the term, I’ve been using the browser ever since it was released last week.  It is so cool.  Well actually so fast!

The team admits it’s far from finished.  Among other things, it doesn’t print, it doesn’t display YouTube-like videos and there seems to be not much in the way of bookmark management.  So let’s give it a number and say it’s 75% done. What it does well is render a web page really fast and when I’m digging around the web that’s what’s most important to me.

The Chronium Blog warns you not to download this version unless “take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.”

It hasn’t crashed for me in about 20 hours of use.  The only gotcha for me was when checking a blog post and panicking when I couldn’t see the YouTube video, but I had been warned.

Anway, if you live life on the bleeding edge and are so Type A that anything faster is better, download the browser and give it a try on Mac or Linux.

As for me?  I’ll probably use it for most of my work on my slight aging Macbook because it just makes the experience so darn fast!

The tech world of buzz is constantly on the watch for “killer” apps. Not killer in that they actually do executions, but ones that will “kill” the previous market leader. That’s like Google did  to Yahoo way back when.

In this David and Goliath atmosphere there’s always a watch for the Google-killer.  We were  promised that last summer in the form of Cuil, another search engine that turned out to be rather banal, just maybe better formatted.

Admittedly there’s nothing very exciting about the look of Google search results.  They look like the same list of links, search engines have always shown us.  Google’s success, of course,  has been in its “Page Rank” algorithm that has a fairly good chance of finding what you’re looking for and putting it at the top of the reults page.

This year’s Google-killer turned out to be very different from it’s supposed victim.

WolframAlpha is an answer-engine (see, not search) that has the rather amazing ability to answers factual queries by computing the answer from data that it already knows.  Now that is very cool — examples that are suggested on their website include:  London to Sydney (will calculate the distance, I don’t know about you but I’m always interested in distances between cities — Austin, TX to Mountain View , CA? — 1477 miles — takes almost 3 days to drive in a U-Haul truck, but I digress), $250 + 14% (will calculate the answer — useful for computing sales tax) and caffeine (chemical analys of the drug, interesting but no intersection with my daily life).

Unlike traditional search engines, WolframAlpha is pretty useless if you’re into the vanity of say Wolfram-ing yourself, it said “Dan Perlman” — Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with that input.  Google found me, my ego is salved.

I wanted to find  what I thought would be a  real world application for WolframAlpha,  here it is, my query:

and my answer:

What could be better than a nutritional computation engine for calculating how well I’m doing on my diet?

Try WolframAlpha and share with us your interesting results.

Other queries, I tried:

Brookline, Ma to Santa Cruz, CA – (How far I moved in 1996)

Phase of Mercury – (Might be what makes things weird)

Dan Perlman – (Wolfram said, huh?)

Conclusion?

WolframAlpha is very cool, can be very useful and will be worth every penny Google pays for it, when theyacquire it  in the next few years.

Inbox Zero being a discipline  to process email as you go along and not keep tons of unread mail that will hold you a guilty hostage to not Getting Things Done.

Anyway, my heart was in the right place, I was about halfway through the message and then zap.  My Gmail web interface goes away and I get this message:

It’s all telling me that they’re locking down my Gmail account for up to 24 hours because of “suspicious” activity.  Now maybe they consider my cleaning up my inbox “suspicious activity”.  They give this list of items that might have caused the lockdown, 4 out of 5 I know I haven’t done.

#5 says your browser can be doing it to you.  Well that would be fine and dandy except I’m using Google’s own browser, Chrome.

They let me back into my email after about 6 hours and I get through another hundred or so.  Today the quest starts again and just as I was down to about 100 messages, zap.  I’m being unusual again.

I’m now waiting them out, again.

What have I learned?

The cursed lockdown only seems to affect the Gmail web interface.  If you already have an email client configured for IMAP you can continue to use your account.

As much as I have bored everyone by tireless pushing Gmail as the only true path for email, Google’s lockdown ability proves that Gmail has a troubling hold over your email that always hangs over your head like a pile of excrement.

As far as Merlin Mann?  I guess it wasn’t really his fault, except Inbox Zero does inject a level of guilt in your dealings with email that’s a pretty strong motivator for a Jewish-guy like me.

George Washington's Teeth

Even in our excremental economy, PCs are cheap.  Microsoft wants to run their entire advertising campaign on that basis, but whatever.  I often use a well-loved MacBook, but in the last year have had occasion to buy two PCs.  Bought a Desktop PC for about $400 and a netbook, mini-laptop for about $300.

After the immediate glow of geek happiness wears off (new PCs always seem fast), the question becomes how to become productive fast.  (I actually had to buy the netbook because we went away for the weekend and I forgot my laptop and needed to do some work).

What I do is connect to Internet and download these 11 apps, and I’m ready to go in about 20 minutes in a productive work environment.

Let me explain.

• AVG Antivirus – Sure you need anti-virus, the world is weird, but AVG Free does a great job and it’s, well, free.
• Google Chrome – Sorry, Microsoft Internet Exporer doesn’t work for me.  I can’t be productive with such a slow browser.  I install the new-ish Google Chrome, which isn’t yet full-featured but is extremely fast.
• Firefox – I also install Firefox, the major open source competitor to IE.  Firefox becomes very full-featured by use of plug-in technology.
• FreeCommander – You owe yourself something better than Windows Explorer.  FreeCommander has plenty of features for making your file and PC management easier.   The dual-interface alone is worth the download.
• Evernote – I store all my information in Evernote (and so should you).  Download the PC desktop version to sync to your web based data.
• Picasa - The best way of managing and editing digital images and videos.
• Skype – For free phone calls to other PCs, conference calls and video calls to other team members.  I also use it for video calling my family.
• Foxit Reader – A lightweight PDF reader, to replace the slow and heavy Adobe Reader
• notepad++ – A hardy open source replacement for Notepad.  Use it for any text editing work that you can get by doing without a word processor.
• Videolan – An open source video player that plays just about any videos you’ve got.
• Revo Unistaller – Finally install this utility to uninstall some of the crap that is often pre-installed on new consumer PC’s.  What comes quickly to mind is the trial version of Symantec Internet Security which is probably already installed on your new PC.  If you activate it, you’ll get it free for a couple of months and then will be nagged to death by the program trying to get you to buy the full version — just saying.

The rest of the apps I use:

• Gmail - Web-based email
• Office Suite – Either Google Docs or Zoho Office, both free and web-based.

Okay, you’re ready to work.

Good for consumers, Microsoft is going to support the Firefox and Safari browsers in addition to Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer.

The online applications will be available to end-users through the Microsoft Office Live service which has ad-funded and subscription options.

While a survey done on ReadWriteWeb earlier this year showed that the majority of that site’s visitors still used the Microsoft Office desktop application for their word processing and spreadsheet needs, there has been growing online competition to the behemoth office suite from the free online suites by Google and Zoho.

We’ve written about the Google and Zoho offerings repeatedly.  It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft will be able to compete online, in the arena they have owned for so long, with the more nimble Zoho and Google.

via ReadWriteWeb

Related articles

• Microsoft Office Embraces The Browser (Thank You Google)
• Microsoft to Take Office to the Web (Now With Editing!)

We probably don’t provide enough help for those brave souls that have decided to use Linux as their desktop – these pioneers don’t use the Mac and certainly not Windows.

Unfortunately for these trend setters they’re also often forgotten by publishers of consumer-oriented software.  Today we’re glad to report that the Google team has made the new Picasa 3 available to Linux users. 

Our previous story on Picasa 3 beta.

The update provides much of what is available to the Windows crowd but does not include the rather cool slideshow movie format. 

Limitations in the Linux version come mostly from the rather quirky Wine technology that Picasa used to port Picasa to Linux.

Download Picasa for Linux [via webmonkey]

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• Google’s Picasa for Linux catches up to Windows

Coming from a software background, to me, the definitions of the development stages of pre-release software are significant and not to be trifled with. To me, alpha tests mean really beware – bleeding edge software – we guarantee it’s going to break on you. Beta software means – still buggy watch out – we’re going to let our users find our bugs for us.

Here at the old Enquiring Mimes factory we tend to look at plenty of software that is described as beta, and we frequently recommend software and sites that are still theoretically in beta – but always with the caveat reminding you to be careful of possible glitches.

What we’re finding more often is that software and web sites never leave the beta stage and the publishers even in many cases may start charging for use during beta.  This leads us to believe maybe a new definition of beta has arrived.

As I’ve mentioned before one of the most puzzling still-in-beta sites is Google’s Gmail which was launched in 2004 and has been used extensively by (me included) zillions of users who seldom encounter any semblance of a bug (spam yes, bug no).

This mystery is explained, at least a bit, in an article on NetworkWorld’s Buzzblog where a Google spokesman explains why a recent study by Pingdom finds that 45% of Google’s products still wear the beta tag.  They tell it like this

“We have very high internal metrics our consumer products have to meet before coming out of beta. Our teams continue to work to improve these products and provide users with an even better experience.  We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web, where people expect continual improvements in a product.  On the Web, you don’t have to wait for the next version to be on the shelf or an update to become available.  Improvements are rolled out as they’re developed.  Rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we’re moving to a world of regular updates and constant feature refinement where applications live in the cloud.”

If you break it down, ths seems to mean that the new definition of beta means more changes/features are coming.

Microsoft adds new features to Outlook every couple of years in a new release.  Google can add new features and adapt to changing market conditions — daily or monthly by adding or changing Gmail.  If that’s true maybe beta is a good thing.