Perhaps the most significant of these is the new priority based inbox which Google themselves have added. This aims to sort the wheat from the chaff in your inbox using some background magic.

What I do really like though is the ability to add/remove sections. A starred section section is added automatically but you can add sections based on filters.

The one gripe I have is that the view does not seem to refresh automatically when you make a change. So, for example, if you starred an item it does not appear in the starred list until you refresh the inbox.

A couple of new third party add-ons have also surfaced in the form of Rapportive and WiseStamp.

Rapportive is similar to xobni but, obviously, is for Google Mail rather than Outlook. It replaces the adverts down the right hand side of the screen with information about the sender culled from the web. So where possible there will be information from LinkedIn, twitter feed etc.

I suspect that the problem is that people separate their personal and business email accounts and so won’t necessarily have their Facebook account recorded against a business email address. I am probably the worst case of this as I use different email addresses for each service, for example, facebook@domainname.com, twitter@domainname.com etc so making it even more difficult to track.

When it does find some information it is a pleasant surprise and works well but right now it just doesn’t find anything often enough.

Finally WiseStamp. This is a service to embed more functional signatures into emails. Using the web-based interface you are able to add buttons to services like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc, a link to your latest blog and your latest tweet. This all gets neatly formatted and automatically added to the end of your email.

The bad news is that WiseStamp automatically embeds the signature on all emails on all Google mail accounts that you have open. This means that if you manage multiple accounts, and in particular multiple business account, you have to remember to change the signature each time before sending – something that I just don’t do and so end up sending the wrong signature. I am told by WiseStamp that auto detecting of the current email account is coming and for me it cannot come soon enough.

So of all the three new additions to Google Mail it is the one developed by Google itself that triumphs. Both Rapportive and WiseStamp have some way to go before they become as essential as the priority inbox already has to me.

Used any of these add-ons and feel differently? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

In a recent review of blogging on the go I identified the ability to easily add links as key – and now you can. Not only that you can also do things like insert bold text and change the font properties, such as the colour. ll this makes Blogpress so much more usable as typing the HTML by hand was torturous at best.

Download Blogpress here.

With its massive, bright, screen the iPad is perfect for viewing photos and coupled with the camera kit it is unbeatable. I have been able to hook up a number of cameras using both the USB and SD connectors, including getting pictures off the iPhone. The iPad has recognised them all and imported successfully. This process is painless and then using the existing photo app it is possible to view and enjoy. Unfortunately the options for managing the photos on the iPad are limited, something I hope that Apple or a third party address in future.

Once the photos are on the iPad it is useful to be able to manipulate them and I have found a few apps that allow you to do that as follows:

Flickr

In order to share my photos I use the Flickr service. They provide a free app that allows you to both view and upload photos to your account. Unfortunately at present this is only an iPhone app but I am sure this will change at some point in the future. The app works well but I couldn’t get it to upload the photos in any size other than about 640×480, even when set on maximum resolution.

Photo Layout

A simple but effective free app for creating collages. You add the photos from your library and then pinch and zoom to move, scale and rotate the pictures into the positions you want. There are buttons for moving the current picture above or below those around it or you can simply touch it to bring it to the top. A good example of what can be created is shown below:

This is the only app I paid for and only did so after reading through a few negative reviews and ignoring them! I’m glad I did as Retouch makes what can be a time consuming task simple – that is to remove areas of pictures you don’t want. See the example below where the crane has been removed. This is a simple example and could have been done with in a painting app with a suitable blue colour but Retouch makes the process easy and also worked on more challenging images too. Well worth the small price.

The last app is another free one that is more generalist. PhotoPad allows you to do operations such as scale, crop, rotate etc as well as applying filters and effects. Great for putting the finishing touches to your photos.

All in all I have been greatly impressed with the iPads photo handling capabilities. The third party apps make it easy to work with photos to get the best results. My biggest criticism would be that the camera kit should be built into the iPad. Apart from that it is perfect.

I have a couple of blogs and post to each on an irregular basis. When I am at home I use Windows Live Writer which, in my opinion, is the best blogging app by far and is the only reason I continue to run parallels on my Macbook.

The iPad strikes me as the perfect blogging platform with its big screen capable of working with text and pictures (which I will cover in more detail tomorrow) and therefore I was disappointed with both the choice and the quality of the blogging apps on offer.

I used three “apps” to try and find the best fit for me and these were: Blogpress, a third party iPad application which supports multiple platforms (including Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad). Wordpress’ native iPad application, which only supports Wordpress and a dedicated, web-based, mobile interface for Wordpress.

It was immediately obvious that all three suffer from the same problem – they are little more than simple text editors. You get zero control over the look and feel of the text, for example, you cannot embolden or italicise text, nor can you change the justification. This I can live with as it is not a major issue for me. What I found most frustrating though was the inability to be able to hyperlink some text or to paste in a link and have it converted. This seems a glaring omission that I hope is rectified in a future release.

Both Blogpress and Wordpress are supposed to offer facilities to insert pictures and to save drafts locally for future updates. Here Blogpress wins hands down on both points. While the picture handling is basic you do get a variety of options for where you want to upload a picture to, including Flickr, and this works faultlessly. I have never been able to get the Wordpress app to insert a picture – it always crashes.

One thing that the Wordpress app does do that Blogpress does not is allow you to see and manage comments and if you get many this may be a time saver for you but if it is blogging you are interested in then Blogpress is for you, even if it is not free.

Maybe it’s me but I just don’t get iOS4’s “multi-tasking”. Multi-tasking is supposed to be a time saver not a confusing pain in the arse.

With the introduction of iOS4 you get (limited) support for apps running in the background. Correction! You get support for certain features running in the background, such as streaming music or uploading a file. For anything else the app is put into suspended animation. These apps are put into, well what can only be described as a system tray. Double clicking the home button now brings up a display of all your running apps.

After a while that tray runs to many apps and takes many swipes to see them all (see screenshot above) which seems to somewhat defeat the purpose of this being a quick way to move between “running” apps. It gets to such a stage that I have so many apps in the tray that it is just as quick for me to find it on the normal home screens. That can’t be right surely? It seems that it is and I am not the only one to complain. The following is Jared Newman in a post entitled Multitasking With iOS 4 is Horrible: Apple Blew It:

“What bothers me the most, however, is the sloppy implementation of iPhone multitasking. Every time you open an app, it gets added to the tray, and the only way to close it is by pressing and holding any app icon, then clicking the top-left corner of the apps you want to close. If you don’t micromanage, the tray quickly becomes overrun with clutter, making it hard to find the apps you really need.”

All this and battery life that is much worse than before (and it was pretty bad to start with). Let’s hope that Apple look into both these issues quickly. However, I am not hopeful as Apple have a poor record on this sort of thing – they have, no doubt, moved onto the iPhone5.

Enter Sainsburys who have started to stock what can only be described as a Moleskine clone. Physically, it is identical in almost every detail – right down to the expanding pocket in the back cover. Where it differs significantly is in the price. The Sainsbury equivalent A6 notebook is priced at £2.99 a massive saving.

My concern was that the difference in price would be reflected in a similar drop in quality but that turned out not to be the case. The Sainsbury notebook is well made and feel similarly durable. The cover is slightly softer than the original but other than that it is fine.

The paper is recycled (a bonus) and whiter than the Moleskine and the final test that it had to pass (for me at any rate) was the ink pen test. Some papers do not work well with ink pens and the ink bleeds but that was not a problem at all.

So, in conclusion, other than being a brand snob, is there any reason not to buy this? Nope.

On seeing it it really does look like an overgrown iPhone. The two are almost identical in design and anyone that has an iPhone will have no difficulty in using an iPad. The first thing that struck me when I picked it up was just how heavy it was. This one had Apples case on it but even taking that into account it is a weighty device. This iPad owner assures me that you get used to the weight but I know that a stand of some description is going to be essential as you won’t want to be holding it for long periods.

In use it is just like the iPhone only snappier. Everything flows much more smoothly and it feels quicker in everything it does. Screen transitions, photo loading etc. are just so quick.

The area where the iPad excels is in its web browsing capabilities. The bigger screen make browsing sites a real delight and I know this is where I will be spending most of my time when I get my own. The additional speed over the iPhone also makes for a better browsing experience. Having used the iPad going back to the iPhone it felt very cramped.

As you can see from the pictures we were using the iPad with my mifi device and it worked very well. There seems to be no reason for me to buy the 3G enabled version of the iPad while I have the mifi which is almost certainly going to be cheaper then an iPad on contract. We also tried out my Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard which also worked well and will be great for those occasions when you have a larger amount of text to enter and don’t want to use the otherwise excellent on screen keyboard.

And the dislikes? Well the weight was a surprise but I would have to reserve judgement until I’ve had a chance to use one longer term. I didn’t like the case but then I have never been a fan of cases anyway, however, it did act as a stand and that is going to be an essential part of its usage. So nothing much really.

When I watched the iPad launch I was unimpressed. I felt that it was just an overblown iPhone and what did I want one of those for? Well the more I have thought about my usage of my iPhone the more I have come to realise that I spend a lot of time on it at home on the sofa browsing the net and the iPad will be perfect for that. Problem is my wife thinks she can see her using one for the same reasons too!

Roll on May 10th.

But one of the things that has always puzzled me about it is the software that is supplied and the relative lack of options available with it. Actually, I guess I am not that puzzled. Three are taking the sensible approach that in order to keep down the number of support calls the device should be as simple to use as possible. And yet I still want more control and I also don’t want to have to install software on my computer to make changes.

So it was with interest that I received an email from a friend telling me that it was possible to reflash the mifi device to provide not only a whole raft of settings but also provided a web based interface through which to make them. Call me excited.

So off I went to read through the posts and work out what I had to do. It was pretty standard stuff: download the update file, plug in the device, run the update and cross your fingers that it works. Of course, it didn’t work and for a horrible few moments I thought that I had bricked the device. This was very much a case of the lights are on but there was definitely no-one at home. Fortunately I re-ran the update and this time all was well the it worked without an drama.

The first thing to note was that now I no longer had to press multiple buttons to connect. The mifi when switched on now goes through the process of connecting to the network and wifi automatically. I am not clear to me why it didn’t do that before because the only reason for switching it on was to connect to the network.

You are now able to go to http://192.168.1.1 to get to an admin panel where you get all change all manner of items – the first of which you need to address is the admin password! Other neat touches are a series of status icons along the top of the screen giving details of battery life and connection status. The screenshots below will give you an idea of the level of control you now get over the device.

All in all this is a great update and well worth doing if you can stand the chance that you may brick your device!

You can quite clearly see that I am holding a cup of tea but it also looks like I have positioned it to protect my genitals! Maybe I misunderstood those articles about Google taking your privacy and thought they meant privates!