Hasta La Gadget!

Earlier this week we reported on a story that had been doing the rounds — another Steve Jobs email thread with an irate customer. Like many other stories about Jobs’ emails to customers, this yarn centered around a user disappointed with his iPhone 4’s service, and Steve’s flippant responses. The first time we saw the story crop up, we were suspicious of its validity (and frankly, newsworthiness), and we became even more suspicious after AppleInsider ran an article claiming that the source of the supposed emails had been shopping the tale for cash (Engadget was not contacted by the source). We did eventually cover the story, but only after Apple itself responded to the tale, claiming — first to Fortune and then to us — that the emails were false, and the exchange had not happened. That struck us as particularly newsworthy, because in all our years of reporting on Steve Jobs’ wild personal emails (of which there are many, many examples), we’d never heard Apple refute that the emails were coming from him.

Now, Boy Genius Report (where the original story appeared) has fired back, emphatically claiming that the emails are real, and that the proof is in the original message headers which the site has been given access to by the source. BGR goes one step further as well, and essentially accuses Apple PR of spinning this story to news outlets to suit its needs. And let’s not mince words — the claim is that Apple PR is lying to the press. The proof which BGR offers is no more or less convincing to us than the site’s previous post on the subject; email headers and timestamps can be faked. Still, it is notable that Boy Genius is pushing back on this story, and we certainly don’t believe the blog would knowingly publish a false email thread. As TechCrunch points out in its take on the matter, PR reps often give vague, sugarcoated, or misleading information to news sites, but there has never been a time when Apple’s PR has outright lied to major publications (that we know of). That would be a mess of epic proportions, and we can’t really fathom why they would go to the trouble. The company has obviously let stuff like this slide for years — this seems like an odd time (and a relatively minor story) to get up in arms about it. We’ve reached out to Apple for further statement on this, and will report back as soon as we hear something. In the meantime, take a look at the source link and see what BGR has to say on the matter.

Steve Jobs emails ‘are real’ claims Boy Genius Report, says Apple PR lied to press originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good news if you’re one of the 114,000 iPad 3G owners whose email address was uncovered by hackers spoofing the AT&T ICC database the other day — AT&T is very, very sorry, and it’s written you a nice email to make it all better. Ma Bell says the “hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program,” which is pretty funny — we can only imagine the damage insincere hackers making a half-hearted effort with a non-random program could have done. In any event, AT&T says the hole’s been patched, that it’s working with law enforcement to figure out who’s liable, and promises that it takes your privacy seriously. Yes, it’s all very nice — although we’re sure affected customers would much rather hear that they’re being comped a free month of service. Full email after the break.

[Thanks, Brad]

Continue reading AT&T sends apology email to customers affected by iPad 3G security breach

AT&T sends apology email to customers affected by iPad 3G security breach originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Carol Bartz and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEOs of Yahoo! and Nokia, respectively, are on stage right now announcing a “strategic relationship” between the two companies on some of their core services. Nokia will be using Yahoo to power its Ovi email and IM services, while Yahoo will be using Nokia / NAVTEQ’s competencies for its mapping and navigation services. Both companies see it as a way to grow their respective userbases, with Yahoo hoping to grab onto the 9 million Ovi users out there, while Nokia hopes that Yahoo could provide it a bit of a USA mojo. Interestingly, Olli-Pekka confronted the US problem head on: “We are an unusual global company in the sense that we are clearly a global leader in our industry, and yet we do not lead in the US.” Carol was similarly forthcoming, saying that Yahoo had “lost its focus on maps a couple years ago,” then correcting herself, saying that they “chose to focus on other areas.” The first merged services should launch in the second half of this year.

During Q&A the big answer to everything seemed to be “scale,” but we also heard Carol toss in “downstream” at an opportune moment. When asked how this relates to Android, iPhone and so forth, Carol clarified that this doesn’t change anything they’re doing on those fronts. “It’s not exclusive from that point.” Each service will be branded as “powered by Yahoo” or “powered by Ovi.” Yahoo will be announcing some “social-like” services for its mail and IM soon, but it’s unclear if that’s specifically related to this announcement. Neither company is talking financial specifics, but Olli-Pekka did make it very clear that a Yahoo-branded device wasn’t forthcoming.

Nokia and Yahoo announce ‘worldwide strategic alliance’ on email, IM, maps, and more originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 May 2010 10:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve just heard from the boys and girls at RIM that the company did, in fact, deploy the long-awaited two-way Gmail synchronization capability to North American BIS users this week. What does that mean, exactly? Well, it means that if you’ve got a BlackBerry on any North American carrier that isn’t going through BES, Gmail should behave more like it should — deleted items will disappear from your phone, emails read elsewhere will show up as read on the device, and you’ll have access to all of your sent items. Oh, and you can create and delete labels from the comfort of your QWERTY thumb board, too, which is a sweet deal. Sure, the feature might be literally years late as far as we’re concerned — but hey, better late than never.

Confirmed: BlackBerry two-way sync for Gmail is now live originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 May 2010 15:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on June 03, 2009 by CyberNet.

This Friday Gmail Labs will be celebrating its one year anniversary. That’s right… those “extras” that you’ve been enjoying in Gmail all started one year ago when they pulled the curtain off of 13 features that testers could enable in their Gmail accounts. At the time none of the ones available were anything to die for, but as time has progressed the things they’ve added have really changed the way I use Gmail. In fact one year ago I was using a desktop mail client, and as more Labs features were released it slowly converted me over to using the web-based mail client.

I counted up the number of Gmail Labs features available, and if my math skills are anything to go by it looks like there are 51 at the moment. That’s almost an average of one per week if you spread that number out over the course of a year. Of the 51 available I have 26 of them enabled.

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the new Gmail Labs features that Google has been releasing, and if I think they’ll be helpful to me I’ll go ahead and enable them. What’s impressive is that even though I have over half of them enabled I don’t see it affect the performance of the site.

I was going to list out all of the ones that I use, but after some careful thought I figured it would be better to only share my favorites:

• Inbox Preview – Show a simple, static preview of the inbox while loading.
• Multiple Inboxes – Add extra lists of emails in your inbox to see even more important email at once. The new lists of threads can be labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want.
• Undo Send – Thankfully I haven’t had to use this yet, but I know the day will come! With it you can stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button.
• Tasks – Lets me manage my to-do list from my Inbox.
• Send and Archive – Adds a button to the compose form that lets you send a reply message and archive the email conversation in a single action.
• Title Tweaks – Changes the order of the elements in the browser’s title bar… makes it easier to see how many new emails there are.

Those are the six Labs features that have really changed the way I use Gmail… particularly the Multiple Inboxes one. I love being able to see certain emails that I’ve tagged or starred right there in my Inbox. It gives me even less of a reason to leave an email sitting there not filed.

So here’s a big thanks to Google and even more specifically the Gmail team! Now they just need to come up with a more user-friendly way to manage which Gmail Labs features are enabled/disabled. Because now that there are over 50 items it can be rather tedious to scroll through the list to find one in particular.

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