I use GrandCentral to manage my phone calls and the features they have are very convenient.

Grandcentral can send you email notifications as voicemail. I was trying to tag my voicemails  "voicemail" - duh and got the following error.
 

Turns out the following labels are not allowed in Gmail.
[inbox, star, starred, chat, chats, draft, drafts, sent, sentmail, sent-mail, sent mail, all, allmail, all-mail, all mail, anywhere, archive, spam, trash, read, unread, voicemail, voicemails, mute, muted]

I guess, judging by the position of the entries in the array as more recent entrants, one could speculate that there's going to be an additional icon for an item that would depict a voicemail or an additional left nav. entry in Gmail which would say Voicemails. That seems to be the case with all these system entries so far and the system labels show up when you search for something.

Something like this perhaps?

Granted, Gmail trails Hotmail and Yahoo by a large margin when it comes to subscribers, but it'll be interesting to see if Hotmail / Yahoo open up their systems and make it free. Btw, does Microsoft have a consumer virtual PABX product? - With all that click to call infrastructure, it ought to have one.

I think the biggest shift that iPhone will bring about in the market place is a plethora of software applications that will leverage multi-touch.

Below are some screenshots from iPhone's patent application that illustrate the context of use.

Understandably, the patent has made enough claims that they appear collectively exhaustive.

Updated June 25th, 2007
What  prompted me to create this entry was a question from someone on linkedin about competitive technology for iPhone.

My predictions based on my current understanding of the technology:

• Applications which do not have a lot of modes (for a good reason) will able to port over to multi-touch quickly and will stand to benefit from it.
• More importantly, the task and the context of use have to be considered to see if multi-touch would be of any benefit, before porting over. Otherwise, we'll end up having a whole bunch of applications with multi-touch interaction similar to what's happening with web 2.0 - I'm a big fan of web 2.0 technologies, but I feel due diligence has to be done to see if the context of use warrants it.

Powerset has finally released glimpses of their search technology. They've posted a few screenshots on flickr.  For the query "Politicians who died in office" the application appears to understand semantically who politicians are - Cool huh? The accuracy of the search cannot be determined from the screenshot, but I would imagine that the accuracy would improve (at least in the near term).

The inline result text also shows the some phrases put together after a "?" graphic. I'm not sure if Powerset's engine constructed it or if it is being shown verbatim from a document. Scary if this was constructed!!!!

I just saw the commercials for iPhone. Clearly shows a marketing team that has well researched the issue of what would be the top questions in the minds of potential buyers. Arguably, what is so different about it and how does it work? Let's make the demo of our product the commercial for the product - plain and simple! The product should sell itself. If it doesn't we'll know it is the product that should be blamed.

Now to my point as to why I think the product will be a huge success. While there could be several reasons why a product might succeed, I think the number one reason is that a company like Apple listens to its designers, period. Contrast that with a company like Motorola.

Do the designers get as much say over a phone as someone in Apple might? The product team would probably flex features left, right and center based on carrier needs. Yes, the markets are different, yes, the customers are different (although there are obvious overlaps), and yes, they have great industrial designers, but would they be bold enough to come up with a pda phone that does not have stylus or a key pad? Would they dare to explore an alternate input mode and make that their USP? The iPhone form factor is larger than your usual pda phone with good reason - use the hand as they stylus, you need a lot more room and no they will not accept the 320X240 as a compromise, or ditch the USP altogether and go for a stylus.

 Yes the RAZR was a grand success due its remarkable dimensions, but industrial design can only get you so much. The remainder of the user experience has to be defined by the UI and any thing that goes into building that experience, from input to feedback...if you want to define something stylish.

iPhone with its not so cheap price tag, is redefining style once again. The product and the commercials definitely create the wow-factor.

The design has been simplified greatly from its earlier versions.

In general, legacy lives. This is particularly true in the case of generational products - where elements of legacy continue to survive, albeit design flaws. Having worked on generational software products myself, I can only imagine the difficulty the product definition / design team must have gone through to change the product's legacy.

Things that caught my eye:

• They killed the famous hand cursor (which used to change state when the mouse button was clicked), a trademark of the product since its inception - probably because every mouse these days comes with a roller which could accomplish the scrolling task and gui applications have been around long enough - there goes a mode that was asking to be killed. (06/13/2007- I stand corrected - the hand cursor still lives and can be brought to life by right clicking on the body of a pdf document but I still don't get why you need the hand as a separate mode, can't I click and move, or roll the wheel? I was at least right about the "legacy lives" part)
• The tabbed arrangement of features such as pages and bookmarks, eliminating the needless functions from the toolbar at top, and inline graphic icons at the top are all signs of superior graphic design and a well prioritized feature list.
• The comments / review tracker, extension to acrobat connect - all appear to be well thought out / user tested in terms of placement.

Who says you can't add powerful features and make the product easy to use at the same time?

Great ads are simply magic. It is like great design in my opinion. You can come up with all the processes and methodologies you want, but the idea just happens.  Peugeot 206 car commercial for the Indian market is one of the best I've seen in a long time. Wouldn't be surprised if it tops some sort of world wide ad billboard chart.

Link to the ad-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGQf9dn0pDk

I'm a fan of Windows Live Mail and have been using ever since it was available as a beta product. I have to say that people who worked on this have made tremendous progress in improving the product since its inception starting with removing ads on that used to show on the right.

That said, let me get to the point. When I say to what can be improved, I'm not referring to incremental improvements such as sorting within search results, or adding a few more fields to search. I believe Microsoft has scaled the territory of email through Outlook enough to know enough about features such as these and their relative importance. 

The following features (presence or absence or the approach taken) make me question them.

• There has been enough research (not planning to reference them here) that suggests  email organization by folders is not something that is intuitive and helpful. Categorization (or tagging or labels whatever you want to call it) appears to be very helpful in this regard. So why is the product still sticking to the folder style organization when it comes to mail? Interestingly, Contact management or organization in Live Mail is much better and follows categorization where I can create groups and add (or tag) contacts to multiple groups.
• The concept of "Rules" / "Filters" for organizing / managing email is also not new to the company. But why is a useful feature such as this buried into the options? Shouldn't this be exposed up front and pervasive, so that as and when I get a message and drag and drop it into a "folder", I get prompted to create such a filter or have a contextual / persistent action as part of the message view?
• Why is it that a single filter cannot have emails from multiple addresses?  I'm not summarizing all the issues with filters here, but in general filters are lacking and require work.
• Multiple select behavior - the on-hover checkboxes and disappearing selections when another item is selected. Weren't check boxes supposed to fix the Ctrl key short cut issue and make selections persistent? Also, Shift +Click only seems to work in select mode and not in unselect mode.

Live Mail Team - are you reading this?

My first post and starting with a rant well, sort of. The Shift + Click behavior on Live Favorites needs to be changed to something more useful.

Right now it just allows selection of selection of groups of multiple items by ensuring that the shift is persistent and not temporal. Gmail, handles this efficiently.  I created a quick example of how I would like the Shift + Click to work.I'll post it once I find a place to put it. The entire suite of live applications is simply superb! and b.t.w. Google Documents or Writely sucks (portions of it atleast)! The product has a link called "Edit HTML" which allows me to post markup such as <script></script>, but silently removes it without any warning after I navigate away from the view. I learnt it the hard way, after losing information I added to a document.

If you are doing things for the sake of security or whatever behind the scenes, at least inform the user of any potential negative impact!!