Google has rolled out the beta version of their Gmail Priority Inbox today, a feature that will automatically rearrange messages in a user’s inbox so the most important ones show up at the top.
For now, the feature is “experimental” and may never go fully live.
Reuters says “the motivation behind Priority Inbox is Google’s conviction that the problem of e-mail overload continues getting worse, forcing people to spend much time and effort managing their inbox both for personal and work-related matters.”
Priority Inbox is optional and users can switch it on or off at their choosing.
If you enable it, Gmail will divide the inbox into three sections; the “priority” box for important messages, the middle box for “starred” and “flagged” messages and the final box for everything else.
Adds Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google’s Enterprise unit: “If you’re in meetings and you come back to your e-mail and you have five minutes between appointments and you have 50 e-mails, which five messages do you spend your time on in that window of time?”
“We see this as an ongoing evolution of the focus of Gmail, which has always been around addressing this problem of information overload,” Glotzbach noted.
Result for: beta version
Although it was severely delayed, Nokia has finally announced the launch of a beta version of its Music Store in India.
Indian customers can use the store to purchase music tracks, music videos and other pieces of digital content for their phones.
The store was delayed over 6 months, and will remain in beta phase for the time being. Currently you cannot even purchase content but can listen to 30 second clips of the songs.
More importantly for Indian users, the store will carry a “large selection of Indian music across different genres, which included music in regional Indian languages as well,” says Symbian Freak.
A Nokia spokesperson added that “The pricing mechanisms for India are currently being worked out.”
Result for: beta version
Search engine giant Google released its Chrome web browser in early September. As expected the browser was released as a beta version but what was definitely not expected just happened. After three months of beta test development Google has released an official stable version 1.0.154.36 of Chrome.
Approximately 100 days, 10 million downloads and 14 updates. That is the Chrome beta in a nutshell. The latest update improves the stability, speed of start up and JavaScript processing as well as overall performance.
The new stable version also improves the bookmark features - you are now able to easily import and export bookmarks to and from your Google Chrome.
Chrome will be updated frequently in the future as well. Upcoming updates will add form prefilling, browser extension and RSS support as well as Linux and Mac OS X versions of the browser.
