My review of Outlook Web Access (see here) inspired me to examine other potential suites that perform the same function that are more widely accessible. The most obvious choice is Google Mail and Calendar. These two together offer almost all the functions that Outlook Web Access can offer, and its available to everyone. I used the Opera browser engine after my experiences with the MicroB in my previous review. Its worth noting that I’ve obscured parts of the images for privacy reasons.
After logging in, you get what you would expect with google mail, your inbox:
However I did find that sometimes, after loading the inbox it then expands each line to contain the first line of text from the email – this then makes each email take up more room so you can see less than what is above, but I never managed to get a screenshot of it happening.
Creating a new mail looks like the following:
I personally quite like this view – very efficient, the toolbar shows all the editing items neatly, it can sometimes involve a bit of scrolling around to type a full email, add contacts etc. But generally I think this displays very well and was very usable in my testing.
I decided I wanted to test attachment handling, so I emailed myself some documents as you can see in the following screenshot:
For each of the attachments you get the option to Open as HTML, and also to open in the Google Docs. I tested Open as HTML for each of them. In my spreadsheet I had a simple Excel (2003) worksheet that looked like the following:
In the google attachment view it came out like this:
Not exactly what I’d call a great view of what is rather a simple spreadsheet, however that is more a reflection on the Google “View as HTML” option for spreadsheets than it is the n800 rendering.
Next up, the word document. I typed up a quick document that had some WordArt in it, and also a tbale with various bits of text. After my spreadsheet experience I thought the wordart wouldn’t even appear and the table might not look accurate. I won’t bother putting up the screenshot of it in word, however, as it looks exactly the same in gmail as it did in Word:
Pretty impressive I thought!
Next up, a the calendar functionality. This all went quite smoothly:
All the various views (day/week/month) etc present well and make good use of the available space.
Creating a new item is also a clean, simple experience:
As you can see, there are various repeating options (not as many as Outlook but still enough in my mind) but its a quick experience to add a new reminder or appointment in the calendar.
Once saved, it looks like the following:
It gives a nice highlight of the days with something happening and the items clearly stand out.
Essentially, Google Mail and Calendar provide a useful suite of organisational tools – as long as you are online. They render well on the n800 and its a quick and easy experience to manage your mail and calendar items with Google on the n800.
I hope that helps someone!
