Gmail is once again having some issues. When I woke up, I noticed that all of my new e-mails were indicating that they’d already been read when I checked from my iPhone. The problem was, I haven’t read any of them yet. I e-mailed Larry to ask if Gmail was down for him too, and he told me that he’d seen on twitter that exchange was having problems. Since I use exchange with Gmail currently, that clearly was the issue. Looking at my iMac, everything seemed to be fine. A few hours later and it still isn’t working properly. I checked in with Larry, and he indicated that his most recent e-mail on the iPhone was from 8:27 a. m. when in fact it was now 11:15 a. m.. His iMac, on the other hand, showed all of the new e-mails. Yes, it’s just another day in Gmail land.

Fortunately there is a bit of a workaround. If you’re currently using exchange on your iPhone to access your Gmail account … don’t. Turn off the exchange e-mail, and go into the e-mail setup wizard and create a Gmail account. Preferably use IMAP in order to set it up, so that whatever you do on your iPhone will be reflected on the server. Once you’re done setting up the IMAP account, make sure that the e-mail exchange account is off and the new IMAP account is on, and you should be good to go. No you won’t have push e-mail, but at least you be getting your e-mail.

Later on, when Gmail exchange is working again, you can just swap back. But don’t delete that IMAP account; it will likely come in handy again, soon.

I’m still trying to figure out how I’ll best be served by Google Wave; right now it seems like a huge disorganized chatroom. If you haven’t yet had a chance to get in on the action, and you want to know what all the web-hoopla is about, I have 18 invites to share. Want in? Leave a comment and I’ll give invites to the first 18 who reply. If you have some extra invites that you’d like to share, you are welcome to do so as well.

Update: Dan has 15 spare invites; once mine are gone, we can keep on giving!

Update: We are out of invites at the moment, but if we score some more, we will share!

There have been rumors surrounding the Android 2.0 SDK for a while now, but it had not yet been released to developers. We knew this would be coming soon, since the Verizon Droid would be launching next month and is reported to run Android 2.0. Well, the wait is now over.

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Within the last week the Google Wave invitations finally started arriving at GearDiary (sorry – we wish we had invites but we’re cleaned out). We’ve been working with Google Wave for the better part of a week and our reactions can be summed up by a phrase we all seem to keep typing into Wave – now that we’re in – what do we do?

It’s a common question so here’s a quick guided tour of what we’ve been doing with Wave but more importantly what some of our concerns are. You’ll see that (for now) you aren’t missing much. This is all very early stage development. It’s not ready for prime time and the vast majority of Wave conversations ask nothing more than – ‘what do we do? – how does Google Wave help us?’. Continue Reading

Google has written frequently about accessibility in the past in a variety of locations. Yesterday, they announced a new website that brings all of their accessibility information into a single location.

Google has always considered access to information part of their core mission. This includes being able to get your data into and out of Google products via the Data Liberation project site. The new Accessibility at Google site is their new home which focuses information on Accessibility from Google products in a single location.  In addition to highlighting information on official Google products, they also showcase third-party developer applications, such as a Talking RSS Reader for Android.

Accessibility at Google (via the Official Google Blog)

On February 9, 2009 Google enabled wireless sync of both contacts and calendars between their service and iPhone and Windows Mobile phones. They did this by using Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology to wirelessly push the updates. On September 22, 2009 Google updated GoogleSync to include push Gmail for iPhone, Touch and Windows Mobile. Unfortunately the system worked seamlessly for all of about three or four days. Since then it had worked but with sporadic minor delays. On Saturday morning October 3, 2009 Larry noticed that all of Google’s properties were briefly off-line.

Since that fateful day my poor Googlesync has been sunk. While it will sync data between my iPhone and Google – it does so extremely sporadically and without any set schedule – certainly not meeting any definition of the word push. Googlesync is beta, so service interruptions are expected – and certainly excusable. But what happened to that “bullet proof” Google of the past? The service that never went down and was so available that many of us switched our email completely over to their Gmail platform?

Google Push Gmail

We mentioned a few weeks ago that the Android 1.6 SDK had been released for developers, and T-Mobile and Google have been rolling it out over the past few days to T-Mobile G1 and myTouch 3G owners. It seems that the rollout is in full force now, as I received the update recently. Read on for more information and screenshots of the new features.

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It’s amazing how much I’ve grown to rely on Google for information.  See Google has control of many of the web sites I visit first thing in the morning, YouTube, Gmail, iGoogle, Google Reader and more.

Problem is though today none of them are loading.  Well some are but it’s taking them an eternity and when they’ve finally loaded navigating is painfully slow.

A brief search of Twitter and I found several people experiencing the same thing.

So is there some sort of planned or unplanned Google service outage going on?

Here’s hoping everything comes back to normal soon.

UPDATE:  Things seems to have come back on line at of 8:oo AM EST

Who would’ve thought we’d see IBM positioned as a low cost alternative technology provider. That’s exactly what they appear to be doing — at least on the surface. IBM’s LotusLive iNotes web mail service is priced at only $36/user per year versus Google’s $50/user per year price for Google Apps Premier Edition. Unfortunately that just might be where the positive comparison ends for most companies. Unlike Google, which provides 25 GB of storage, IBM only offers up 1 GB of email storage (you can buy added storage for an extra annual fee). They also lack the word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications that Google includes in their Google Apps bundle. Of course for anyone deeply embedded in Lotus Notes this is probably a wise investment as the service claims integration with your existing on-premise software. Naturally IBM also touts tighter security and a whole host of other corporate type benefits.

LotusLive iNotes via Physorg.com

As promised the new version of NetNewsWire for iPhone and iPod Touch is now out and available for download.

Will it be my new RSS reader of choice? Read on in this first look…

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I’m quite happy using the iPhone/iPod touch RSS reader Newsstand these days. Since its last update it syncs beautifully with Google Reader. In addition, it offers a terrific set of added functionality such as integration with Twitter, Instapaper and ReadItLater.

It is fast, it is stable and it is quite enjoyable to use. (Heck, even Larry who cursed me out for encouraging him to buy YET ANOTHER RSS app had to admit it is worth purchasing!)

Still, word that the new version of NetNewsWire for iPhone is on the way and, like its desktop cousin, syncs with Google Reader has me pretty happy. Continue Reading

If you’ve been openly sharing documents that you’ve created in Google Docs then you may want to take another look at your settings just to make sure those documents are ok for public consumption. Google today sent around notice early today that in a few weeks documents, spreadsheets and presentations that you’ve explicitly published outside your organization and that are linked to from a public site will be crawled and indexed. This means they’ll appear in search results you (and the rest of the world) sees on Google.com and other search engines. Fortunately there’s a way to prevent the world from seeing next years’ company payroll spreadsheet that someone mistakenly shared publicly by setting certain administrative controls in the Google Apps Control panel. Full email after the jump.

Google Apps Sharing Options Continue Reading

Hold on to your hats because this one is going to blow your mind… with regard to the whole Google Voice debacle it turns out… wait for it… okay, ready?… it turns out APPLE LIED!!!

Shocked? Amazed? Dumbfounded? Yeah, neither are we.

But the hubris Apple has to bold face lie to the FCC is pretty amazing.

Not sure what we’re talking about? Let’s go back a bit…

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Google announced an updated version of the developer SDK used for programming for the Android mobile platform yesterday. The SDK is now at version 1.6 (codenamed: Donut) and brings new hardware and software support. While the SDK is aimed at developers making changes for the platform, the upcoming user features are detailed.

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Google has had a Twitter account called @dataliberation for a while now, but an official site was just launched today. The Data Liberation site explains how to get data into and out of Google, using standards-based, open formats.

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