Having compared the Touch to the iPhone recently, I decided to dig around and find a decent video clip of the TouchFlo technology in action. I found this snippet from Shiny Media, presented by a Microsoft zealot and an HTC non-believer, so whilst there were no fisticuffs at least we were presented with a relatively unbiased review.

The TouchFlo technology did look good in action, but the QWERTY touch pad? Man, who has fingers that small! I know you have a stylus but surely they could have come up with something better for input. Having said that there was an interesting quote in the video from HTC regarding the Touch’s market

It’s not designed for business people, it’s going to be for the multi-media user.

I guess that says it all really, a great cellphone/mp3 player but not a real pocket PC.

Rather than read me banging on about the various features of the Motorola RAZR 2 check out this video from Shinymedia. Two lasses show off the new features on the RAZR re-incarnation although as they point out the vibrating touch screen feature - hauptics - is a bit difficult to demo in a video! A warning about the video is that your eye will be drawn away from the RAZR 2 by the garish ‘rose ring’ worn by the faceless presenter. Apart from the ring, enjoy!

I am writing this more as a review and a short story rather than a survey, despite the question mark in the title. Along the years, I was put in the position of using many mail software applications, from the early versions of the classic Outlook Express to the useless-featured IncrediMail. However, I had a computer at that time that was the best source of troubles I have ever seen. Everything was going down so fast, and despite my backups, I was losing my e-mails, contacts and important information. I was living in an era when CD-RW’s were highly expensive, and my internet connection was dial-upped. My ISP was providing a 1MB e-mail address and I thought that’s more than enough for what I needed. Anyway, enough with the story. I’m trying to evidence the ups and downs of the POP3 compared to the webmail.

If I would have been asked this years back, I would have taken a strong moral stand in favor of POP3 because it seemed like the best option, unlimited space (I had most of my HDD to extend to), offline browsing (dial-up access was a luxury) and I could customize my client just the way I liked it. I had about 20 filters against spam, even if I was receiving about 5 e-mails/week and just a few more spam messages. Like I was saying, despite of the fact that I was losing my mails regularly due formatting, viruses and such, I still was a fan of OE and other POP3 applications.

On the other hand, today, when you are subscribed to so many forums, registered on so many websites and talking on so many e-mailing lists, the 1MB storage space would have been too little. Luckily, they all realized that and increased the storage space over time. Another important aspect is mobility and I got to realize that as soon as I needed to access the Internet from somewhere else (work, school, friends), but I also needed my e-mails. *poof*. Suddenly, the whole webmail alternative wasn’t looking so bad.
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