Faster Forward

Before I take leave of this computer for the long weekend, it's time to attend to one of the most contentious issues on the Web: the Gmail folders-versus-labels controversy.

Since Google launched its free Web-mail service on April Fool's day of 2004, it has insisted that Gmail's labeling system--in which you can tag messages with one or more labels like "work," "repeatedly forwarded jokes," "spam," etc.--works better than traditional folders for organizing your messages.

That argument has some logic to it: With labels, you can file a message in more than one place, just as playlists work in a music program. But many Gmail users have spent too much time with folder-centric mail programs to give that up. Many others don't bother with labels at all--at one point, only 29 percent of Gmail users had created even one, the Mountain View, Calif., company revealed in a blog post yesterday.

Back in February, Google relented on its label-centric view, adding a "Move To" command that both applies a label to a message and transfers it from Gmail's seemingly endless inbox to an archive folder, named after that label.

Yesterday, Google conceded a little more. Gmail now displays your labels just below its real folders (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Spam). You can label a message by dragging a label from that list onto the message. And you can label and move messages in one step by dragging them onto the label listed at the right--the same action you'd use to chuck that e-mail into a folder in a program like Microsoft's Outlook or Apple's Mail.

If you'd place yourself in the folder-traditionalist camp, are these latest Gmail tweaks good enough for you? If you'd rather categorize yourself as a labeler, has Google compromised the concept too much with this step? Sound off in the comments... but, please, not if that would get in the way of watching parades, setting off fireworks, catching a baseball game or other appropriate July 4th weekend activities.

It's been almost three weeks since my review of Palm's Pre smartphone ran, and so it's due--um, overdue--to return to Palm's PR department.

Since that story and its accompanying blog post, I've learned a few new things about this $200-ish smartphone.

One is that keeping its system software and add-on applications current requires little more than a tap of its Updates tool to check for, download and install any updates. So far, Palm has shipped two minor revisions to the Pre's operating system--one with various bug fixes and performance tweaks, a second with security patches.

The Pre's App Catalog of add-on programs remains nearly vacant, with only 29 applications listed on the review Pre today--but by a week ago, Pre users had still racked up one million software downloads. Palm has also announced that it will open its app-development program to the public by the end of the summer

Sprint, the only wireless carrier to offer the Pre in the U.S., has not revealed sales numbers, though it did brag that the Pre "had broken previous sales records (first day and first weekend) for a Sprint device." One outside analyst's research, however, suggests that the Overland Park, Kan.-based carrier sold more than 300,000 Pre phones in June.

Other carriers will have to wait to sell the Pre or a comparable device running its software. There's plenty of evidence that Palm is developing and testing a version that works on the GSM wireless technology used by AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile in the U.S., as well as in most other countries. Verizon Wireless, for its part, seems interested in selling the Pre once Sprint's exclusivity ends.

Finally, I've had the chance to try out two extra Pre features. The first, its $69.99 cordless Touchstone charger, seems a tad pointless. Yes, it's cool to be recharge the Pre (once you replace its back cover with a slightly heavier substitute included in the Touchstone's box) by leaving it on top of this pedestal. But is it that hard to plug in the Pre's USB cable? Won't you need to do that every few days anyway to copy a different set of songs to the phone?

The second feature--the "Full Erase" option waiting behind the Device Info app's "Reset Options" button--is a lot more practical, at least to reviewers who need to scrub their data off a device before returning it. After a tap to confirm an are-you-sure prompt, the Pre shut down, rebooted, and a minute or two later launched into the setup screens you'd see if you had just taken it out of the box, showing no evidence of my old data. That's a lot more convenient than the memory-wipe routines I've seen on other phones.

I happen to be a Sprint customer myself, so the Pre could be a logical upgrade. But I'd first like to know what features a 1.1 update to the Pre's operating system might bring (the ability to synchronize only some Facebook contacts would be a real help, for example). I'd also need to have a wider variety of add-on programs, which probably means waiting for Palm to open up software development for the device. What about you: What would you want to see happen with the Pre before you'd consider buying it?

The past 24 hours have brought news that a lot of tech enthusiasts have been waiting to see--no, not Apple's report that chief executive Steve Jobs is back on the job after a successful liver transplant.

One item comes courtesy of the Supreme Court, which yesterday let a lower court ruling stand that permitted Cablevision Systems Corp. to offer a "remote storage" digital video recorder service to its subscribers.

Cablevision's idea was fairly straightforward: Instead of putting an individual hard drive under each subscriber's TV, why not let customers save their recordings on a centralized server? But a long list of companies in the movie and TV business--to name a few, Major League Baseball, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the Screen Actors Guild and CNN--objected, claiming that Bethpage, N.Y.-based Cablevision was really offering a video-on-demand service and should pay them extra for the privilege.

Individual viewers would be hard-pressed to see any such difference; whether the video they watched came from a box in their living room or in a data center somewhere, the experience would be about the same from the couch. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed with that logic and rejected the lawsuit (see this recap of its ruling by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a brief in support of Cablevision); when the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal, that ended the case. Now Cablevision is free to roll out this feature--and, more importantly, other companies can experiment with other video-recoding services that rely on network storage.

(For an interesting exercise, compare the logic in this case to the history of My.MP3.com, a music service that let people listen to streaming copies of the music on their own CDs.)

The other tech-news item comes from Mountain View, Calif.,-based Mozilla, which shipped the next version of its Firefox browser this morning. Mozilla Firefox 3.5--a free, open-source download for Windows 2000 or newer, Mac OS X 10.4 or newer and recent versions of Linux--brings a few distinct upgrades from last summer's Firefox 3.

To judge from my experience with beta versions of 3.5, the most important part of this browser may be its faster JavaScript performance. Firefox 3.5 also catches up to competitors with a new set of privacy options, including a private-browsing mode that prevents it from keeping any record of your Web use. (Yes, I'm aware that this could be convenient for viewers of certain... ahem, video-intensive sites. It's also useful if you're borrowing a computer from a friend or using one in an Internet cafe.)

Other 3.5 features may need some time to pan out. For example, it can--with your permission--estimate your physical location and pass that on to Web sites, which can then provide information tailored to your neck of the woods. (See Flickr's implementation of this feature.) Firefox 3.5 also includes built-in, no-plug-ins-needed support for free, open audio (Vorbis) and video (Theora) formats. Despite their cost and licensing advantages, those formats have yet to see much use compared to the likes of Adobe Flash--but will Firefox's endorsement lead more sites to give them a shot?

Firefox 3.5 looks to be off to a fast start--a page at the Mozilla site tracking downloads of the new browser has gone from recording a little over 1 million downloads to almost 1.4 million while I've been writing this post.

I have, of course, installed this browser on one computer and will soon do so on a few others. My plan is to write about it for my next column, and you can help with that: If you've installed Firefox 3.5, what do you think of it? And how would you compare with the other popular alternatives to Microsoft's still-dominant Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome?

Extroverted Facebook users will soon have a new way to share their thoughts with passerby--an option to publish status updates not just to friends, but to everybody online.

A post on the Palo Alto, Calif., company's blog explained the rationale behind this new feature:

You may have some posts you want to share with a wide audience, such as whom you voted for or how great the weather is today. Other times you may have more personal updates like your new phone number or an invitation to join you at your favorite restaurant for dinner that are meant for only close or nearby friends.

To allow that flexibility, Facebook is rolling out a new option for users who have made their profiles viewable by everyone. A new lock icon in the Publisher, the "what's on your mind?" form, will allow users to choose a potential audience for each status update: everybody on or off Facebook; all of their friends and all of their networks; friends and their friends' friends; only friends; or a custom combination that includes some people and excludes others.

Brandee Barker, Facebook's director of communications, said in a call on Friday that users would be able to discover these new public updates through an upgraded site search, now in testing, as well as its home page's highlights section.

Note that since this new Publisher option matches a profile's overall privacy setting, the people in this beta test will broadcast all their updates to the world unless they choose otherwise by clicking that lock icon. When users who haven't made their profiles world-viewable gain access to this feature, as the company hopes to do soon, logic would dictate that their updates will remain no more public than their profiles--but this change has already been misinterpreted as "Facebook will make status updates public by default."

Facebook watchers are also wondering if this represents the site's latest attempt to one-up Twitter, which has drawn a huge audience by helping people broadcast their own public updates. For example, the social-media news site Mashable picked up on a new Facebook setting indicating that people could connect with your profile "as a fan"--which sounds just like Twitter's "follow" option.

The weird thing is, Facebook already has a mechanism for people looking to connect with fans: the public pages anybody can set up. Barker said the company had not yet decided if public updates would take the place of public pages, and that the new notification option spotted by Mashable was just a test and would likely be removed. (It's still in my own settings; do you see it in yours?)

Forgive me for being skeptical, but I suspect that the Facebook folks already have some definite opinions on that issue. The public-page option can be difficult to discover and tricky to set up (thanks in part to badly-written Facebook add-on applications that break on public pages). Letting well-known, expressive or exhibitionist Facebook users broadcast updates to the public at large without having to create a new public page on the site--and then hope users find their way to that alternate address--could be simpler.

If you're on Facebook, do you have any interest in this new public option? Is the prospect of being able to publish some updates only to a subset of your friends list more interesting? Or do you already feel overwhelmed by all of Facebook's privacy and publicity options?

I don't want to call Apple's iPhone old, but it is maturing. The new iPhone 3GS just doesn't bring the kind of groundbreaking improvements delivered by its predecessors--the original iPhone's gesture-driven touch screen, auto-correcting onscreen keyboard and Safari Web browser, or the iPhone 3G's App Store and Global Positioning System self-awareness.

Today's review covers what I think is important about the 3GS--$199 to new and renewing AT&T Wireless customers in a 16-gigabyte version, $299 in a 32-GB version--and the iPhone OS 3.0 software inside it. I had a lot of ground to cover in that piece; please read it with a realization that what I deemed important may only reflect my own weird tastes. (For example, one of my favorite iPhone 3.0 features, the ability to sync notes to your computer, only merits a two-sentence mention on page 16 of Apple's reviewer's guide.)

Unsurprisingly, I had to leave out some details in the column. But that's what this blog is for!

Voice control:

I find computerized speech recognition fascinating, so I had to try the iPhone's version of it. And I was pleasantly surprised to see this device understand commands like "tell me what's playing?" in a noisy Metro station. It also recognized the names of some of the more pronunciation-defying artists in my collection (for instance, Meshell Ndegeocello), even ones it couldn't speak correctly when confirming my selection (Björk, which it pronounced as "Be-jark").

Of course, it served up some amusing mismatches, perhaps none more so than when it interpreted "play songs by Herbert von Karajan" as "play songs by Everclear." (Yes, I know he was a conductor, not a composer; it's not my fault iTunes can't keep its tags straight.)

Voice Control also suffers the problem of other command-line interfaces: You have to know the proper syntax upfront. So when I said "play music by Fugazi," it was confused (a failing that led me to Twitter incorrectly that it didn't know the pronunciation); when I instead said "play songs by Fugazi," the D.C. punk-rock band's "Waiting Room" was cranking through the headphones a moment later.

Video:

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington made a good point when he wrote that the iPhone 3GS could quickly make cheap pocket camcorders like Pure Digital's Flip models obsolete. What's easier than having simple video-uploading software that runs when you plug the camera into a computer? Being able to run that software without needing a computer at all.

I should note here that iPhone 3G owners can enable a video mode on their devices by jailbreaking it to install an unauthorized video program. A co-worker of mine did that earlier this week and pronounced himself satisified with the results (as well as his newly-won ability to arrange add-on apps in folders).

Push notifications:

The iPhone (Apple's own core applications excepted) remains a mono-tasking device, but with the 3.0 software Apple added a way for third-party programs to hand off tasks to the operating system when they're closed. This "push notification" system won't help you listen to Pandora's Internet-radio program while you tap away at your e-mail (although you can listen to a Web-radio site's streaming audio link through Safari), but it does work well for programs that normally spend most of their time waiting for one input or another.

Like, for instance, instant messaging. I installed AOL's free AIM application, sent a test message to a friend and closed the program. A few minutes later, a beep and a small onscreen dialog notified me that the friend had replied; tapping that dialog brought AIM back up. It's not bad--but it's nowhere near as elegant as the Palm Pre's genuine multitasking.

Have other questions? I wouldn't be surprised. Post them, along with any other comments you might have about the iPhone 3GS, below. Or send them my way during my Web chat, starting at noon EDT today.

This morning, Microsoft revealed the last major missing ingredient to Windows 7, the upcoming replacement for the flawed Windows Vista: what it will cost.

A post on the Redmond, Wash., company's Windows Team Blog outlined four possible prices home users can pay in the United States:

* Starting tomorrow, if you buy a computer with Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate from a vendor participating in Microsoft's Windows 7 Upgrade Option program, you'll pay "little or no cost" for an upgrade to 7 when it ships Oct. 22. (In other words, if you were going to buy a new PC today, wait until tomorrow.)

* Also starting tomorrow, you'll be able to pre-order an upgrade copy of Windows 7 Home Premium for $49.99 (with an upgrade of 7 Professional going for $99.99). But this pre-order deal only runs through July 11 or "until supplies last" in the U.S., whichever comes first. How many copies will be available before these supplies run out? That's an excellent question...

* Otherwise, the upgrade edition of Windows 7 Home Premium will cost $119.99, $10 less than the $129.99 Microsoft charges for an upgrade to Vista Home Premium today. Upgrades to 7 Professional and 7 Ultimate will run $199.99 and $219.99. The usual upgrade path will be from Windows Vista to 7; published reports have indicated that Microsoft will also allow Windows XP users to buy 7 at the upgrade price--but they'll have to wipe their hard drives before installing 7 and then reload their data and programs. (Run Microsoft's free Upgrade Advisor application on your PC before contemplating any upgrade to 7.)

* A full, non-upgrade copy of 7 Home Premium will cost $199.99, with full copies of 7 Professional and 7 Ultimate going for $299.99 and $319.99.

Customers in the European Union, however, will face an extra wrinkle. In response to inquiries from EU regulators about including a choice of Web browsers in Windows 7, Microsoft decided to excise its Internet Explorer browser from the European version of Windows 7--which it's now calling Windows 7 E. Today, Microsoft announced that it will sell a full version of 7 E at upgrade prices. But as ZDNet's veteran Windows watcher Ed Bott warns, a normal upgrade won't work with those copies--EU users will need to wipe their hard drives and do a clean install, just like XP users here. [Bott sent me a message on Twitter clarifying this point; you won't need to wipe your drive, and restoring your data won't be as tricky as I'd suggested.]

The reaction on the other side of the pond seems... less than charitable. (Sample word: "insane.")

What's your take on the deals Microsoft has put on the table? Will you pre-order at the low price? Or will you wait until 7 ships to see if it represents a good value?

Comcast and Time Warner said this morning that they're working on plans for a big increase in the amount of TV shows watchable online for free--but only by people who also subscribe to their regular TV services.

This scheme goes by the name of "TV Everywhere." The idea is that the best way to cover the costs of producing TV shows is to get online viewers to pay for them--not by charging them directly, but by requiring that they first show that they pay for a TV service. It's right there at the end of a list of bullet points in their press release:

TV Everywhere is open and non-exclusive; cable, satellite or telco video distributors can enter into similar agreements with other programmers.

Yes, you read that right: To watch this new batch of TV shows online, you'd have to sign up for a traditional pay-TV plan.

The TV Everywhere idea has been a dream of some media people for the last few years; see, for instance, Mark Cuban's defense of the idea. But I don't get it. At all.

Set aside such operational issues as authentication (how do you verify that one person's a Comcast/DirecTV/Fios/etc. customer and another is not?) and those broadband caps that cable Internet providers seem so fond of (won't all the Web viewing made possible by TV Everywhere bump you over your quota?). No, the real problem is that TV Everywhere is illogical, unfair and stupid.

It's illogical because it makes a simple matter far too complicated. If somebody wants to watch video online, let 'em: Charge them a fee, make money off their attention through advertising--better yet, give people a choice between watching ads or paying for an ad-free experience. But don't force them to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service.

It's unfair because it forces people to buy one thing to get another--as if, say, you had to subscribe to the Post to take one of the Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan test-prep courses. Not only is that kind of "tying" begging for an antitrust lawsuit, it's also guaranteed to annoy viewers who have switched to Web viewing precisely because they're sick of the ever-higher charges of cable, satellite and fiber TV service.

And it's stupid because it ignores every lesson of online media distribution. Repeat after me: Trying to introduce an artificial scarcity of easily-duplicated content on the Internet does not work. If you set up boundaries that make no sense to your customers, you will simply cede the field to bootleg redistribution of your work. Fighting this principle is like trying to push water uphill--with a broom.

Let's not forget that this proposal comes from two companies that share a history of questionable Internet-usage limits and surcharges--and year after year of dismal customer-satisfaction scores. You really have to wonder what they're thinking in Comcast and Time Warner's executive suites these days.

But that's just me... I could be wrong. What's your take on this idea?

Yesterday was not a good day for the District of Columbia and its neighbors. And, like on many other bad-news days, the Internet was there to tell the story of Metro's two-train collision in real time.

Somewhat to my surprise, nobody seems to have been Twittering from either train. But that status-update site quickly filled with updates about the event from people watching it online and on TV -- some of the first photos to emerge on the Web were screen captures of TV news reports.

Facebook updates took a little longer to reflect the news -- the site definitely operates in a slower gear than Twitter -- but became the easiest way to verify that friends who live on the east end of the Red Line were alright (this was before I realized that the two trains were heading into the city, not out of it).

Meanwhile, local blogs -- The Post's Get There and Washington City Paper's City Desk but also such volunteer efforts as DCist and We Love DC -- published several thousand words' worth of updates, starting within a half hour or so of the collision and refreshed every few minutes for much of the evening.

(Metro's own status updates, as seen on displays and heard in announcements in stations and as sent to riders' phones via text messages, were much less informative. I realize that you don't want to freak out people trying to get home with all the gory details, but it's still a stretch to label a train wreck as "mechanical difficulties.")

Barely an hour after the collision, a colleague noted that Wikipedia had already noted the event. Today, that page has grown to include an extensive account of the accident, thoroughly linked to news accounts and background material after hundreds of revisions.

It's amazing how quickly the Internet can surface and synthesize our knowledge of an event, isn't it? But it's a lot more rewarding to watch this happen when there's good news involved.

Apparently, this iPhone thing isn't getting old: Apple announced this morning that it had sold more than one million units of its new iPhone 3G S through Sunday.

The lines to buy an iPhone may not have been as long as in the previous two iPhone launches -- the Apple Store nearest my home had a mere 100 or so people in line at 9 a.m. on Friday. But the demand was still high enough to yield yet another round of stories of iPhone buyers who couldn't get their new $199-and-up gadgets activated on AT&T Wireless's network.

(This morning's Apple press release is also notable for including a quote from chief executive Steve Jobs that is not followed by "he said while recovering from a recent, successful liver transplant." The Wall Street Journal broke one of this year's odder business stories over the weekend, reporting that Jobs had a liver transplant -- for what exact reasons remain unclear -- about two months ago.)

Meanwhile.... also today, T-Mobile announced its second phone to run Google's Android operating system, the T-Mobile myTouch. This model -- it will be "available for pre-order," an e-mailed press release says, starting July 8 for $199.99 -- runs the 1.5 version of Android, which allows it to dispense with the swing-out physical keyboard of the older T-Mobile G1 in favor of an onscreen keyboard.

Having had the chance to paw over a myTouch for a few minutes last week, I can report that this new model looks and feels considerably sleeker than than the G1. It will also include a T-Mobile-specific Sherpa program that's supposed to customize its searches of nearby establishments to match your own preferences.

But there's already one thing I don't like about this new Android model: its name. Can we please dispense with these Fisher-Price "mySomething" names already? Maybe I'm just grumpy after a decade or so of Microsoft telling me that the files stored in that folder on the desktop are "My Documents" -- really, who else would they belong to? -- but that entire naming convention needs to go.

(Besides, do you really want a moniker that reminds people of this year's biggest flameout in social networking?)

If you were hoping to see the second Android phone in the U.S. market come from another carrier, you'll have to wait a little longer. Both Sprint and Verizon Wireless have said that they plan to sell Android phones, but not until later this year.

I hope to try out T-Mobile's new phone -- see, I just can't bring myself to write its name -- soon, and I am trying out the iPhone 3G S now. That review should run this week; if you're questions about this model or suggestions about aspects of it that I should investigate, leave a note in the comments. And if you can think of a better name for T-Mobile's latest Android device, please suggest that too.

My commute to work this week hasn't left the usual amount of newsprint on my fingers. Instead of grabbing a section of the Post to read on the train (the Metro section usually fills that block of time perfectly), I've taken a Kindle DX loaned by Amazon's PR department.

The experience was pleasant -- I was no longer limited to one section of the paper, I could listen to some music (using the MP3-playback function Amazon labels as "experimental") and, of course, I didn't have any gray ink leftovers on my fingertips. On the other hand, I didn't have to pay for the Kindle, since it's going back to Amazon's publicists next week.

Today's column doesn't provide an unqualified endorsement of this device. I think the DX has some potential unavailable in the smaller, lighter and cheaper Kindle 2 (for one thing, as you can hear in today's tech podcast, the DX correctly pronounces President Obama's last name), but it doesn't look like it's going to upend the e-book market.

Its $489 price alone should see to that. But the DX also suffers from the same DRM-imposed constraints as earlier models. Look, I don't care how cool it looks today; why should I invest my money in books that I can only read on the devices that Amazon allows? I don't put up with that in music and fail to see why I should accept that with books.

Well, at least books of lasting value. Things like textbooks and travel guides -- what you could call disposable literature -- are a different matter. And in that respect, the DX could be a huge step forward, thanks to the e-textbook tests Amazon will be running with five schools later this year.

The DX's newspaper deal -- agree to subscribe to the Kindle edition of The Post, the New York Times or the Boston Globe, and you'll be able to get the device at a discount -- also shows promise. But as I noted in today's column (and in the post I wrote when the DX was unveiled), it's counterproductive to limit that offer to people who can't get home delivery of each paper. If people closer to D.C. would rather pay to read the Post in Kindle form, why not let them? For that matter, if home-delivery subscribers would also like to add a Kindle subscription, why not cut them a break on that second form of delivery?

To judge from the comments on that earlier post, you agree with me on those points.

For what it's worth, other reviewers haven't quite been bowled over by the DX either:

* The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg pronounced the DX a disappointment and called out one issue I didn't mention -- the absence of a lefty-friendly button layout.

* At mocoNews, Staci Kramer was no more enthusiastic, noting some glitches with wireless reception.

* Wired's Steven Levy gave it a 7-out-of-10 rating.

* At USA Today Ed Baig couldn't get over the Kindle DX's price.

What are your thoughts on the DX, and on the Kindle lineup in general? The comments are yours...