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Well, a few days ago I posted about Virtual Desktops and how useful they were. Of course, that was before I gave them a thorough drive test. During the past week I have used both Dexpot and Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager and I have to say - they have both crashed my PC and/or lost my applications. I mean, to be fair, when they worked they were great. But I can’t have my PC crashing at some unknown point when I’m running an application in this day and age.
Obviously, I had to unload the little beasties and am now back to where I was, wishing for a good virtual desktop manager and having to live with a single cluttered screen.
Another update to follow, I’m sure.
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One of the few shortcomings of the T-Mobile G1 phone since its release has been its lack of a synchronization tool for Microsoft Exchange email (a la corporate email). I am pleased to say that a recent check of Android’s Application Market has revealed two tools that now solve the problem to a certain extent. They are Moxier Mail Beta and Touchdown. These two applications are a little different from each other and which one you choose will probably depend upon how you use email on your G1 phone.
Moxier Mail is the newer of the two products, only having been released last week. It is currently availabe as a free beta until March 31st 2009, and after that will be a purchaseable download from the market (prices yet to be confirmed). I briefly tried Moxier and it seemed to do the job of syncing with my corporate email very well. So well in fact it ran in the background, even on a reboot, and happily displayed all my new emails as they arrived. The downside is that there is currently no support for contact or calendar information and that apart from inbox and sent (which it displays as one), there is no support for other folders. With regards to set up though, I have to say it’s really easy. Two minutes and I was done. So, if you’re looking for something that sits in the background and really offers true push email, this may be the product for you. One note of caution though, the G1 is known to have battery limitations and this program, by running constantly in the background, is not going to help that situation.
Touchdown, on the other hand, takes a different approach. It has two versions of the program available to choose from. Firstly there is the paid version ($29.99) that has full functionality - including contacts, appointments and multiple folder support - and then there is also the free ‘read only’ version, that doesn’t allow you to send emails or store more than a day’s worth of emails on your phone. Sound stupid? Not at all. For me this is actually my preferred way of operation. All I want is the ability to read any emails that come up out of hours, or in between meetings, and check on my appointments. I can respond to the actual email when I am back in front of my computer. To be honest, I hardly ever send an email from my phone, even using Google Mail, usually all I do is read new emails. I can always text someone of I need to, which is generally more efficient anyway if it’s an urgent situation. Set up of the program is a little more complex than Moxier (but probably is able to work in more diverse configurations), but after reading through their PDF help page I managed to get it all connected. It is not a true push email program so it doesn’t run continually in the background as such. You can set it to poll your email account every ‘x’ minutes. You’ll have to work out what’s best for you (paid version only - on the free version you need to refresh ad hoc).
On a separate note, for me it’s only the email part of any of these applications that I am really interested in. All my contacts and calendar appointments are already synced to my phone via Google. Oh, how I love modern technology!
So, there we have it, two solutions (make that three from two different companies) for getting your corporate email on your T-Mobile G1 phone with Google. I am confident there’s a version that will suit your way of working. Now this is something I love about the T-Mobile G1 phone and the Android platform, constant innovation and new concepts coming to the marketplace. I even read about a true GPS turn-by-turn mapper that came to the market this week too. But that’s another story for another day. In the meantime I will continue to very happily use the free version of Touchdown and view my corporate emails and appointments as and when I wish…
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During the last few months the desktop on my home PC has got more and more crowded with open windows. It’s one of those gradual things that you don’t immediately notice until it’s too late. Well, this week too late finally arrived!
I decided it was time to look at Virtual Desktop tools again. On my old Windows XP PC I used one and I really liked it, and on all the Linux PCs I’ve used, I’ve always had one there too. So why not on Vista, I asked myself? I hunted around the Internet and found a couple and in the end decided to give Dexpot a try. Now I will be the first to say that this tool is as boring as they come. And I mean Boring with a capital ‘B’. But in this case, that’s a good thing. The last thing you want is a piece of software that allows you to switch desktops that gets in the way of everything.
Dexpot boasts a lot of features in a very small package and can do everything from set individual backgrounds to get programs to start automatically in certain windows. It seems to be Vista friendly too, even though it was originally developed with XP in mind. So now I have four virtual desktops I can switch between (you can have up to 20), and my word processing can finally be separated from my social networking, which is now also separated from my day-to-day browsing.
It’s nice to have relatively free desktops once more.
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