"Use Linux? Now you can video chat too"

If you’ve been wanting to use voice and video chat on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it’s now available! Visit gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin and get started. Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon.

"New in Labs: Video chat enhancements"

If you use video chat in Gmail, you might be interested in a new Labs feature we just rolled out that allows you to preview new video chat features before they're turned on for everyone. Visit the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, turn on "Video chat enhancements," and right away, you'll see higher resolution video and a bigger video chat window.



The higher resolution video uses a new playback mechanism which enables widescreen VGA and frees up valuable resources on your computer. For it to work, both you and the person you're chatting with will need to have the lab turned on. Remember that you can always revert to standard video chat by disabling the lab.

Google is planning to add more video chat enhancements to this lab in the future, so if you have it on you'll automatically get those too. Feel free to post your comments or report any issues you encounter in the video chat forum (we also follow #googlevideochat on Twitter).

Get Faster Access To Emails Through Gmail Priority Inbox

Gmail has just got better with the launch of its latest Priority Inbox where in the user can get faster access to emails.

In a not so distant past, people used to write letters, both for important official matters and for personal wishes. Then, the era of e-mail dawned, which made things easier and comfortable. Then came Gmail and now, Gmail has come up with its new Priority Inbox.

Gmail, as we all know, is a free webmail, IMAP and POP3 service which is provided by Google, and was launched on 1^st of April 2004. Since then, Gmail has been used by numerous people all over the world, and has made communication much easier than it ever was. If you are a professional, you receive a lot of emails every day. If you are an HR officer, then some hundreds of emails every day is not really a surprise.

At times, you must be really fed up of this huge bulk of emails which comes knocking at your inbox. Gmail, as they always do, has come up with a solution, in the form of the new Priority Inbox, which will identify your important email on its own, and will separate them from the other emails so that you have the most important matters in front of you. This unique feature is in the form of an algorithm, and the Priority Inbox will make use of keywords and the people with whom you exchange emails more often. These emails which will be identified as most important by this new featurewill appear on the top of your email, so that you can deal with them sooner.

The new feature will appear just above the ‘Inbox’ folder in your Gmail. Now, instead of displaying how many unread emails are there in the Inbox, the new Priority Inbox will show you how many priority emails are yet to be read, and will be marked as ‘Important and Unread’. Below these ‘priority emails’, you will have your ‘starred mails’ and ‘flagged emails’, followed by all the other mails.

During the testing of the new feature, researchers found out that a user usually spends around 16% less time while reading irrelevant mail. Priority Inbox is a dramatic step taken towards solving the problem faced by users in dealing with the time wasted on unwanted emails, which as a result, they are left with lesser time to devote to the most important emails.

You can have a close look to how the new Gmail Priority Inbox works at YouTube, and check mail the smarter way! I am sure you would thank Google for the addition of the latest feature just like what you must have done for the New Gmail feature that lets you Call Phones from Gmail.

Windows Phone 7 initially on GSM, then CDMA in 2011

Windows Phone 7 devices coming this fall will initially work with GSM carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile, but will not include carriers of CDMA technology, which include Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel.

"Microsoft chose to focus on delivering a great GSM version to the world first, and then a great CDMA version in the first half of 2011," a Microsoft spokesman said Friday via e-mail.

Microsoft is "placing high-quality customer experiences above all else," he added.

GSM is widely used throughout the world, although in the U.S., CDMA represents about half the nation's wireless customers.

Finland-based Nokia, the largest maker of mobile phones globally, announced a push into the U.S. market earlier this week, and also said that it will not focus on further CDMA phones for the U.S., preferring GSM technology and development for 4G phones running LTE, a faster wireless standard.

The first phones running Windows Phone 7 are expected to go on sale next month, according to various reports. An Oct. 11 launch date has also been reported.

Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft's attempt to recapture smartphone and mobile phone sales, especially to consumers, after several quarters of disappointing sales with its older brand, Windows Mobile. The OS maker is expected to take a 4.7% share of the smartphone market for 2010 and 3.9% by 2014, according to a recent Gartner forecast

"LG Electronics CEO resigns after smartphone struggles"

After struggling to compete with the iPhone and other high-end smartphones, LG Electronics chief executive Nam Yong resigned Friday.

Yong is the latest in a series of mobile executives that have resigned or been ousted after lackluster sales in the smartphone market. In the course of a week, Nokia's CEO, Chairman, and smartphone chief all announced their resignations.

Bon-joon Koo, "a member of the founding family of the broader LG conglomerate," will replace Yong as CEO, according to a report by theWall Street Journal. Koo is currently CEO of LG International and was previously an executive at LG Display.

Smartphones are being blamed for the recent corporate turnover and shaky quarters. "Numerous makers, including Nokia and LG have attributed declines in profit margins to pressure by other smartphone makers such as Apple Inc. and Research in Motion," the report noted.

Although Nokia and LG are ranked number one and number three in global handset shipments respectively, they have, for the most part, been shipping budget low-margin handsets, rather than pricier offerings that can compete with the iPhone or BlackBerry.

In August, Research firm Gartner called LG's strategy "risky." After analyzing second quarter data, Gartner noted that LG's average selling price fell 27.7 percent even as handset sales fell year-over-year.

Recent data from comScore revealed that LG managed to hold on to its second-place ranking of mobile OEMs in the U.S., but the Korea-based company was missing from the list of "Top Smartphone Platforms."

LG launched its first global smartphone this week: the Android-based Optimus One, but the news is too little, too late for Yong.

The company is also trying to make up for lost time in tablet market, where the iPad has taken an early lead. Last month, LG vice president Chang Ma proclaimed the company's upcoming Optimus tablet as "better than the iPad."

"IE9 and Windows XP: Readers speak out."

The biggest is that IE9 won't work on a lot of computers. That's because the new browser is incompatible with Windows XP, an operating system that -- despite being two generations old -- is still widely employed in businesses and at homes. (IE9 works on Windows Vista but is really made for Windows 7).

Several readers posted comments on the XP snub. Frieddoughwrote: "So this puts my five year old computer with Windows XP one step closer to being obsolete. Sorry, I refuse to drop another grand, at least, so I can read my email from home for the next few years before that becomes obsolete."

Reader johnnynobody was equally frustrated: "Lack of XP support turns me off to this browser," he wrote.

And then there was juscurious: "They do this KNOWING (and not caring that) their customers will be XP'd off."

But some readers were more sympathetic to Microsoft's side. "You all realized that XP is 10 years old..," wrote drvax. "I bet you cannot name one company that offers support for a software product that old. Apple, Oracle, Novell, IBM, HP etc. NOT a one."

Adds harbor521: "C'mon people...I'm a die hard XP user and even I can figure out that you can't keep making new products compatible with things forEVER...the problem is not that IE9 doesn't work with XP, it's that XP is too old to work with the new tech in IE9."

This couldn't have been an easy choice for Microsoft. Sure, it would have been nice for XP to work with IE9. But the chief benefits behind IE9 come in embracing modern Web standards and technologies that are incompatible with the older operating system.

Meanwhile, one of the other problems I had mentioned in my review was that I couldn't log into online bill pay with IE9, though I had no difficulty doing so with earlier versions of IE. Microsoft informed me that a "compatibility tweak" was applied to the back end and pushed via a seamless IE9 update. In my case, it resolved the issue.