By: Gurpiyar Singh
The integration of mobile phones into social life is still in its infancy in most parts of the world, triggering a set of socio cultural convulsions as institutions, people and places adapt to and regulate its use. As is typical with technologies that alter patterns of social life, the mobile phone has been subjected to onslaught of criticism for the ways in which it disrupts existing norms of propriety and social boundaries. While celebrated as a technology that liberates users from the constraints of place and time, it has equally been reviled as a technology that disrupts the integrity of places and fact-to-face social encounters.
"Even a silent mobile can make its presence felt as though it was an addition to a social group, and … many people feel that just the knowledge that a call might intervene tends to divert attention from those present at the time".
Mobile messaging has been prevalent among the youth population since nineties, when pagers were adopted as a way of sending text messages among high school and college students. By the mid nineties, different variants of mobile phones began to replace pagers in the youth and general populations. In addition to telephony these phones had the ability to send short text messages between mobile phone handsets. With the advent of Internet, users were able to send longer messages regardless of phone type or service provider. All of these technical developments have supported the rapid spread of mobile email among the youth population.
We use the term mobile email to refer to all types of textual and pictorial transmission via mobile phones. This includes what Japanese refer to as "short mail" and Europeans refer to as "short text messages", as well as the wider variety enabled by the mobile Internet. Even as mobile phones have become common in all age groups, however, the younger demographic has a higher volume and unique pattern of usage that differentiate them from older users. At average students pay more than the general mobile using population. Secondly, the growing mobile work force across the world have a greater need to mobile email access so as to remain connected with information at all times, at all places.
The proliferation of mobile devices and the increased demand for mobile email among "on the go professionals" provides easy web browsing and email capabilities, producing user-friendly email experiences mirroring traditional computers. Mobile emails enable the user to receive and send emails via their mobile phones and view text, pdf, picture and sound attachments thereby enhancing the overall work potential, efficiency and productivity of the mobile professional. It also enables the management to improvise the flow of information and ability to control mobile workforce with greater effectiveness.
By: Renu Singh
Recently, search giant Google Inc. has added some new features to its Web mail service Gmail.
The intuitive, efficient, and useful beta version of Gmail was available for general public from February 7, 2007. Gmail is getting more and more popularity day by day and till date it has millions of users. This feature will make you to walk through the additional features that are adde In this feature I am going to present additional features added by Google to Gmail.
Group chat is a small but interesting feature for Gmail users that allows you to chat with more than one friend at the same time. This can be achieved by following these simple steps:
• Start a chat with a single person in your Contacts list.
• Once you've started the chat, click Options at the bottom left of your chat window and select Group Chat.
• In the labeled "Add a person to this chat"; enter the name of the contacts you want to add to your group chat.
The group chat will continue until all participants have left.
Free IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) feature will automatically and instantly synchronize your inbox with your phone or your desktop and you can make changes from anywhere to your inbox. IMAP creates a constant connection between mail clients (desktop and/or mobile) and Gmail. The feature also allows users to download messages from Gmail's servers onto their computer so that they can access their mail with a programme like Microsoft Outlook Express or Apple Mail.
Increased attachment limit is another distinctive amendment is that Gmail has fixed attachment limit to 20 megabytes (MB). But, when you add an attachment, the size of a file may increase because transport encodings are automatically added and it means that in some cases, attachments that are 17 to 20MB in size may push the total message size to above 20MB. Attachment is actually a computer file which is sent along with an e-mail message which can be sent in either in unencoded form, or encoded form.
A message notification provides you a better and smarterway to access your mails as this feature notify you on your phone, when you got a new message in your inbox. More so, if someone sends a reply while you're in the middle of reading a conversation or replying to it, you'll get a notification that a new message has arrived. You can easily update your Gamil by clicking "update conversation" option in your mailbox.
Get mail from other accounts allows you to retrieve your mails either new and old from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail and you can create customized 'From:' address, which allows you to send messages from Gmail. One thing that should be taken into consideration is that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled.
New Gadgets surfing features provides you an option to integrate Google Gadgets in Gmail's left-hand navigation bar. For the initial phase, the company has provided two sample Gadgets Google Docs and Calendar. The Gadgets can be easily enabled through the Gmail Labs tab in the Settings menu. Google has also added a Gmail Labs option to `Add any gadget by URL,' which allows you to add any Gadget using iGoogle.
An emoticon is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form. Examples of well known emoticons are the smiley faces. Emoticons have been available on Google Chat for quite some time, but recently they made their appearance on Gmail. Besides the common gestures like smiling or winking, the new emoticons have been added to help users get their points across better.
At crux, we can say that the above additional features will make Gmail more efficient and usable for users.
