AT&T’s Galaxy II will come out October 2nd

Seth Weintraub

Trying to get in before the October 4th flood perhaps, today AT&T announced their Galaxy S II varient would hit shelves on October 2nd.  We’ve talked extensively about the Galaxy SII here (read).  As a refresher, AT&T’s is closest to the international version with the same 4.3 inch display – contrasted with the 4.5 variety that T-Mobile and Sprint are carrying.  Interestingly, it will also have NFC, which Sprint’s surprisingly doesn’t.  Sprint is a partner in Google’s NFC-based Wallet initiative.

This is an amazing phone but it is interesting that AT&T is squeaking it in before the iPhone announcement.  On the other hand, it says something that AT&T is going with the Galaxy SII moniker rather than something like “Captivate 2″.  It seems like Samsung’s Galalxy S line can stand on its own.  T-Mobile called its 4G Vibrant model the Galaxy S earlier this year so it appears to be a trend.
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Contacts manager from consumer Gmail now live in Google Apps

9to5 Staff


Google Apps customers can now roll revert changes to contacts for up to a month.

Google announced customers who host their domain on Google’s servers are now able to take advantage of the Contacts interface which has been available in consumer Gmail for some time. Users of Google Apps for Enterprise will notice that adding new contact information now defaults to “Work” instead of “Home”. Thanks to the prettified interface, you can quickly add email addresses to groups, and pick from a contact’s multiple email addresses to use on a group-by-group basis. Most importantly, the new Contacts manager lets you undo contacts import and go back in time up to a month in order to salvage deleted or merged contacts.


Add multiple contacts to a group in a snap.

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Gmail chat liberated: Read your chat logs in your email client via IMAP

9to5 Staff

As you know, Google Takeout, a recently introduced service, allows you to export your data from the Google cloud. For example, you can download an archive from Google Buzz, Picasa Web Albums, Contacts and Circles and Google Profile – even Google Voice. Beginning today, it is possible to pull your Gmail chats to an email client such as Thunderbird, via IMAP protocol.

Even though Gmail’s been working with your local email client via IMAP for ages, you were not able to retrieve chat logs – although they appear as email messages under the Chat label in the lefthand side of the web interface. Per Google’s blog post, recorded chat logs can now be downloaded to your local email client provided it’s configured to use IMAP. You only have to tick the “Show in IMAP” checkbox for Chats in the Labels tab of your Gmail settings. A step-by-step instructions in the video above.

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Three new Google Docs features put the fun in functional

9to5 Staff

Google Docs, the office productivity suite from everyone’s favorite search provider, has gotten updated with three new tools that Google says “put the fun in functional”. These are the format painter (finally!), fusion tables and drag & drop images. Format painter has been long in the coming and was arguably an important missing feature that probably put off some people from entrusting the cloud with their office productivity.

It’s real simple, just select a chunk of text and press the paintbrush button to copy its style (font, size, color and other formatting features) and apply it to one or more (double click the paintbrush button) blocks of text. Handy shortcuts are also available:

To copy the style of your selected text
  • Mac: Ctrl+Option+C
  • Windows: Ctrl+Alt+C
To apply any copied styles to whatever text you have selected:
  • Mac: Ctrl+Option+V
  • Windows: Ctrl+Alt+V

More on fusion tables and drag & drop images after the break.

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Gmail is “almost 80 times” more energy efficient than the alternatives

Jordan Kahn

Google has just published a study entitled “Google’s Green Computing: Efficiency at Scale” comparing traditional business email solutions with Gmail. The results? Gmail is “almost 80 times” more energy efficient than conventional in-house software. This takes into account all Google infrastructure necessary to support the service.

A report from the Official Google Blog explains:

“…cloud-based services are typically housed in highly efficient data centers that operate at higher server utilization rates and use hardware and software that’s built specifically for the services they provide—conditions that small businesses are rarely able to create on their own.”

To help put it all in perspective (kind of), Google offers the comparison presented in the graphic below showing one year of Gmail is comparable to drinking a bottle of wine, stuffing a letter inside, and throwing it in the ocean. Google also put YouTube to the test and discovered that 1 minute of video consumes approximately 0.0002 kWh of energy. Thus, 72 hours of video would be equivalent to one packaged and delivered DVD. 
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Export Google Voice data with Google Takeout

Jordan Kahn

As of today, Google Voice has been added to Google Takeout, a service which allows you to quickly export data from specific Google applications. You can now export voice communications (transcripts too) with voicemail and greetings as mp3s, phone numbers as a vcard, and text messages as html.

The service lets you create a quick full archive of all your data, or select just Voice or another service. You can check out Google Takeout now, which also allows you to download data from other applications including your contacts, stream and circles from Google+, Picasa Web Albums, and your Google Profile info.
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