Thinkcage

Google Mail’s web interface has tons of great features missing from even older and more established desktop mail applications. One of my favorites is the way it handles email attachments. Clicking “View all attachments” will do just that opening them in a new browser tab all together rather than downloading them to your computer and relying on the user to both find and open the images. This option is only visible when the attachments are images. Smart!

Similarly, with non-viewable attachments (such as the ZIP archives in my example) GMail offers a “Download all attachments” link. This packages all of the files into a single ZIP archive and downloads them all at once. What is more, GMail manages to intelligently name the new ZIP file based on its contents. Really smart!

This is one of the coolest and most useful web services I’ve seen in a long time. Google has just launched the Google SMS query service. Send a query to 46645 (googl) on your phone and get a nearly instant SMS reply.

To get started, simply SMS “help” to 46645. The reply will contain some basic instructions that detail the four currently supported queries:

• Business and residential directory listings – Send person or business name and city, state or zip code.
• Definitions – send define and a term.
• Prices – send price and a product name.
• And tons more – such as zip code lookup, area code lookup, calculator, etc.

So far this looks incredibly promising. And what a contrast to the slow, and unintuitive service the mobile phone companies offer. I have service, through T-Mobile’s T-Zones which, though rich with information takes many more clicks and tons more time to come up with the same info. All Google needs to add it directions and movie time to make this service complete.