LinkedIn declined to comment, while Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra ducked our attempts to talk to him.

Sources familiar with the negotiations said LinkedIn offered Rapportive “low teens” of millions of dollars worth of cash. The deal has not officially closed yet.

Rapportive, which is still available only for Gmail, overlays an email correspondent’s social networking accounts alongside open messages and drafts. So, for instance, you can see a person’s most recent tweet and mention it in your email to them. Or you can realize that you’re not connected on LinkedIn to a person you just had a meeting with, and rectify that.

Rapportive hasn’t publicly disclosed how many people use it, but in September, Vohra was quoted as saying Rapportive users viewed more than 65 million contacts per month. He also said at the time that the company was preparing to sell premium products.

Competitors to Rapportive include Xobni (our coverage) and Mingly (our coverage). LinkedIn also bought a somewhat similar contact management start-up called Connected last fall.

Last spring, Google introduced its own competing “People Widget” for Gmail, which Rapportive then integrated with its own product.

Rapportive raised about $1 million in 2010 from investors including Charles River Ventures, Dave McClure, Paul Buchheit, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar and Venture Hacks.

House lawmakers met with Google Deputy General Counsel Mike Yang and Public Policy Director Pablo Chavez Thursday to discuss new policy that unifies 60 of Google’s services under a single user agreement and grants the company greater license to share user account information between them.

But the closed-door session ended well short of resolution, with at least a few members of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that presided over it openly criticizing Google’s explanation for the privacy changes.

“[They] danced around actual details, and instead spoke in generalities, highlighting their efforts to ‘enhance the user experience’,” said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas.

Subcommittee Chairwoman Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif. was equally critical.

“At the end of the day, ultimately, I don’t think that their answers to us were very forthcoming necessarily in what this really means for the safety of our families and our children and ourselves,” Mack said.

To be fair, Yang and Chavez reportedly did provide a thorough walkthrough of Google’s new privacy settings. But that wasn’t quite what the subcommittee was looking for. What lawmakers really want to understand is how easy or difficult it is for users to protect their privacy and control how their personal information is shared across Google’s services.

“Consumers want to know if they hit the delete button, that something truly is deleted,” said Bono Mack. “The concern is that if I’m logged into Gmail and then forget to log out when I then go to search for information about cervical cancer, my data can then be transported to YouTube. Does that mean my health information is at risk?”

A fair question, and evidently one that’s going to take a few more hearings to get an answer to.

Organizing your inbox might sound tempting. The Radicati Group reports that the average employee spends about 25 percent of their day on email; by 2013, approximately 507 billion email messages will be sent each day. Many people dream of hyperproductive days unhampered by junk mail, forwards and unimportant exchanges. We’re envious of (and slightly annoyed by) friends who accomplish that “inbox zero” feat (and then post about it on Facebook or Twitter — you know who you are).

But before you get obsessive-compulsive about color-coding and labeling emails, keep in mind that over-organizing doesn’t necessarily solve your email problems. In fact, you’ll likely remember less of the information that’s in the emails if you do that.

A study conducted last year by IBM Research — originally posted on MIT’s Technology Review — found that while “active foldering” reduces the complexity of the inbox, there’s a lack of systematic data about the extent to which these folders are actually used, so it’s hard to determine whether the hours occupied by filing emails to folders is time well spent.

Also, “frequent filers” tend to remember less than non-frequent filers about their email messages. The IBM Research study, which analyzed 345 frequent users’ methods of finding emails, found that email users tended to have pretty good memories when it came to content, purpose, or task-related information in emails, recalling more than 80 percent of such information; those who moved things into folders were less likely to remember these things, possibly because they were not frequently exposed to the information in the inbox.

Of course, users aren’t going to remember everything that’s conveyed in every email. But when it comes to effective search — which in some cases negates the need for all that foldering — remembering key words is, well, key.

Lastly, the study suggests that email threading is the better alternative to manually moving emails into designated folders. People with high thread-count emails were less likely to use or need to use folders, and people with more threads were less likely to need to scroll through their inboxes, as well, suggesting that threads were an effective way to compress inbox information.

Gmail already has a pretty efficient search function and collates emails into threads. But as part of Google’s efforts to push Google+ in other areas — like search — the company is also suggesting Gmail solutions through Google+. In fact, new Gmail users don’t have a choice when it comes to Google+; building a profile is part of the sign-up process. (Google’s current Gmail user base: 350 million; Google’s social network users: Murky.) Searching for emails through Google+’s circles seems a bit confusing for the average user, though, and would benefit only those users who have spent a lot of time building up their Google+ contacts.

For those looking for outside apps to aid in email organization, some of the more popular ones include Xobni and Postbox. Others, such as Shortmail and Clarify, think simpler, shorter emails could put you on the path to inbox nirvana.

(Photo courtesy of robep/Flickr)

Here’s a year-end recap app that could actually be useful: ToutApp analyzes your email throughout the course of the year and provides data on your busiest month, day of the week and time of day for email exchanges. It also tells you who you email the most, who you receive the most emails from, and which marketers send the most emails.

An application that analyzes your email accounts may seem like a huge waste of time, but the purpose of ToutApp is to make users more aware of what their email patterns are so they could, theoretically, be more efficient with their time. According to Pingdom, 107 trillion emails were sent worldwide last year, up from 90 trillion in 2009; an average of 294 billion emails are sent per day.

ToutApp can take some time to work, depending on the size of your inbox. It took a couple hours for the ToutApp to scan my entire Gmail inbox — around 15,000 emails — and it eventually revealed that I receive more emails than I send. I also learned that January of this year was my busiest month in terms of email traffic (I’m going to unscientifically pin that one on the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which probably upset the average), and that I send the most emails between 8 pm and 9 pm — which makes me a fantastic dinner date. ToutApp also listed individuals as well as circles of people I email with the most, and highlighted key words that often appear in my email.

Some of the data, such as the list of emails from marketers, could be channeled into usefulness. And ToutApp’s analysis says I received hundreds of Facebook notification emails this year, which reminded me that I should probably disable “Notifications,” as that would help declutter my inbox.

But other info — such as the fact that “FW” is a key word that often appears in my emails — didn’t tell me much, except that I get a lot of forwarded mail.

ToutApp only works on Gmail accounts, and in order for it to work, you have to allow it access to your Gmail account. The company is not affiliated with Google, and it says says that during the analysis process it will not have access to your password or any other personal info through your Google account.

Google’s information section on third-party access says the data and activities available to third-party sites, like the ToutApp, depend on the Google product;, some apps may not be able to add or modify data or may be able to see a small portion of data. (To unsubscribe after your ToutApp report is generated, you can go to Authorizing Applications & Sites under the My Account area in Gmail, and revoke access.)

ToutApp comes from a San Francisco-based start-up that offers email management services for business owners. According to its Web site, Tout is backed by venture capitalists Esther Dyson, Dave McClure and Eric Ries, along with other angel investors and seed-stage firms.

If you’re looking for apps that dissect non-Gmail accounts, a research group from the MobiSocial laboratory at Stanford University has created something called MUSE, or Memories Using Email, that works to analyze and chart your exchanges across different email accounts. There’s also something called Topalt Reports for analyzing email through Microsoft Outlook.

Could Google’s Android be Facebook’s new best friend?

It just might be, although it’s unlikely the feeling is mutual.

In making Android open source, Google has given would-be rivals many of the tools they need to offer mobile devices with services that compete directly with those of the search giant.

Once Google releases that version of Android, companies are free to do virtually anything they want with the code. It is this openness that attracted Facebook to Android, even though Google is probably the company’s fiercest rival.

That’s because Facebook, like others, can use Android in ways that compete quite directly with Google, all without paying that company a penny. However, device makers have some tough choices to make when they decide how far they are going to deviate from Google’s proscribed path. Changing the code — known as “forking” — creates both business and technological challenges.

Those that don’t meet certain compatibility and other requirements can’t use Google’s mobile services, for example. In some respects, that’s no big deal, since in many cases Facebook will want to use its services and those of its partners, rather than those from Google. However, it also means that Facebook won’t have access to some things it might want, such as the Android Market for third-party programs.

To the degree Facebook wants other Android apps to run, it will need an alternative, such as Amazon’s App Store, or lesser-known stores such as those offered by companies like Appia and GetJar.

In addition to missing out on Google services, making changes too deeply can mean that apps designed to run on Android won’t work, and that the software will be hard to update once Google comes out with a new version of Android.

For most phone makers, the benefits of following Google’s plan outweigh the opportunity to do deeper customization.

Not everyone is choosing to stick to that path, however. Amazon, for example, uses Android for the Kindle Fire, but has done so in its own way. Others have tweaked Android, too, such as tablet maker Fusion Garage, which has layered its own tiled interface over Android for its recently released Grid 10 tablet.

In the case of the Kindle Fire, some but not all Android apps will run on the tablet device. Amazon has also hidden much of the user interface that is part of the stock Android release, and has put in its own browser, music and video services in place of Google’s.

For Facebook, there is the same kind of opportunity to offer its own services, including messaging.

But customizing Android isn’t necessarily a panacea to make Facebook competitive in the mobile space.

First, social is an important component of the smartphone, but not the only one. Customers also want a phone that can easily access multimedia, download apps and perform other tasks far outside Facebook’s traditional wheelhouse.

As a result, Facebook’s foray into mobile may also mean it needs to either create or partner for many services it doesn’t offer currently, including music and video services.

Still, it is understandable that Facebook might see Android as its most attractive option, even if there are others. Intel has been looking for partners for its mobile Linux efforts, for example, while HP is eager to find a good home for webOS.

However, neither of these come with what Android does — a huge base of consumers and developers already using the operating system.

Related Posts on the Facebook Phone:

1. It’s Finally Real and Its Name Is Buffy
2. Forking Android Offers Both Promise and Pitfalls
3. The “Slayer” That Wasn’t
4. If It Comes, Will It Already Be Too Late?
5. The Facebook Phone: Why Would You Want One?

Full Facebook Phone Coverage »

“Over this past year, we’ve focused efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser and will continue investing in this area,” Google said in a blog post.

Users with the app installed can continue to use it, Google said, but it won’t be supported, nor will it be available for continued download.

The move comes as Google is finally releasing a native Gmail app for the iPhone. The company released the app last week, but pulled it after discovering several bugs.

Google on Wednesday released an iOS app for Gmail, bringing a native email client to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

However, the reaction from early downloaders was nearly universally negative, with editors from Mashable, Engadget and other sites all having nothing nice to say.

“I have to admit, I’m near tears at how bad this gmail app is,” wrote the Verge’s Chris Ziegler in a post on Twitter. “Is it okay to cry?”

“Yeah, it’s horrible,” responded Engadget’s Myriam Joire.

For those who still want to experience it firsthand, the app is available from the App Store and works on all devices running iOS 4 and later.

UPDATE: Google says the Web has a point, and has pulled the app. Here’s the text of a Google+ “Googla culpa” post from Google “apps guy” Dave Girouard: “Earlier today we launched a new Gmail app for iOS. Unfortunately, it contained a bug which broke notifications and caused users to see an error message when first opening the app. We’ve removed the app while we correct the problem, and we’re working to bring you a new version soon. Everyone who’s already installed the app can continue to use it.”

Many industry pundits have talked about the Consumerization of the Enterprise — the idea that enterprise users expect the mobility, integration and ease of consumer technologies in their work lives. People often cite the move to user-purchased mobile devices like the iPhone or user-provisioned collaboration services like Box, DropBox and Yammer as evidence of this phenomenon. And because many of these services have freemium models, IT departments are finding that huge numbers of their employees are already using these services for business purposes in addition to personal ones. So in many ways, consumer expectations are driving the ways enterprise CIOs think.

But what about the other side of the phenomenon? Eddie Murphy’s character Billy Ray Valentine influenced Dan Aykroyd’s character, Louis Winthorphe, III, as much as the reverse. What’s less discussed — but equally fascinating — is the impact of enterprise requirements on the consumerization trend.

Many of the aforementioned start-ups initially focused entirely on end-user needs, providing simple user interfaces and sign-ups, and building multi-million user customer bases in the process. But as these vendors switched focus from user acquisition to monetization, they realized some IT department requirements are legitimate, and more importantly, are barriers to sale.

The most recent example: Box. Box founder Aaron Levie probably never imagined his company would be working with enterprise IT directors in designing his product roadmap when he started his file sharing company, but nonetheless it recently announced partnerships and integrations around identity federation, mobile security, e-discovery, and other IT-centric areas.

In contrast, DropBox has continued to focus heavily on end-user adoption with limited IT focus. Indeed, their total reported user counts dwarf those of Box or any other service. Yet the CIOs I’ve spoken with had a proliferation of users on DropBox and Box when they decided to standardize on a collaboration service. Despite the fact that their companies may have had more DropBox users, Box’s enterprise functionality tipped the scale in its favor. So while user adoption gets you in the door, without some enterprization you don’t get the sale.

Similarly, for Google’s Enterprise team, bringing Gmail to companies involved a lot more than just learning how to charge for the service. Google has spent the past several years trading places with Microsoft, investing in policy management, security, compliance and other IT-centric functionality to address early inhibitors to adoption. And it has worked. Analyst firm Gartner now sees Google as a viable alternative to Exchange for enterprise collaboration.

Indeed, even in the truly consumerized world of mobile devices, iPhones and Androids don’t roam free in most large companies. Many security-sensitive organizations are investing in Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions like those from Good, MobileIron, Zenprise and Symantec, to bring enterprise manageability to smartphones.

The Enterprization of these traditionally consumer apps is going to center around three legitimate enterprise requirements:

1. Data ownership: While enterprises are excited to leverage the flexibility and fluidity of cloud apps, the idea of an enterprise’s intellectual property spread across hundreds of cloud services, many times in user-provisioned accounts where the enterprise has no access, is scary. What if the company is involved in a lawsuit and has to put a user’s data on legal hold? How can the company recover data if the cloud service loses it? And most importantly, how can the company get its data back if it wants to change services? Tough questions if the data is trapped behind a user’s personal cloud account.
2. Data security: Similarly, the thought of sensitive customer information living in cloud accounts where users choose passwords like “password” or, for the more secure, “password1,” is nerve-wracking to a security officer. How can the company ensure that its data is protected with strong passwords? When an employee leaves, how can the company revoke access to all cloud apps at once? Without company administrative rights, the enterprise is dependent on the judgment of the user.
3. Data compliance: Whether data is stored on your G:\ drive or in Gmail, if it’s work-related, for the most part the same compliance rules apply. While SOX, FRCP and GLBA are not as sexy as FourSquare, Angry Birds and AirBnB, they are still critical for most companies. How can companies meet regulatory requirements around searchability, records retention, logging and other areas?

The real challenge as start-ups address the needs of enterprises is to maintain the core value that earned users in the first place. If they add every feature IT asks for, will the products lose their usability? If they make it easier to lock down access to the systems with two-factor logins when you can’t remember one factor, will users revolt? If these tools were used to get around IT, will the fact that they can now be monitored scare users away?

Time will tell. But this grand experiment would make the “Trading Places” brothers proud. And a lot more than $1 is at stake.

Nick Mehta is CEO of LiveOffice and has served in senior operating roles in the enterprise and consumer technology markets for much of his career. He spent more than five years at Symantec Corporation and Veritas Software Corporation (now Symantec), where he served as vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Vault information archiving and discovery software business.

The first two Smartr apps are for Gmail and Android, available today; the next one on the list is iPhone. The Gmail and Android apps had previously been in beta, so the news today is more about the overall strategy than their existence. Xobni’s Outlook product will continue to be called Xobni.

All the Smartr apps will learn from users’ emailing, social networking and calling histories, compiling a detailed and constantly updated dossier on each contact. That expresses itself in some handy features, like an autosuggesting email composer that understands which people belong in a group together and whether to use their work or personal email.

That kind of feature may be especially useful on mobile, where users can type just a few letters rather than scroll through alphabetical lists of people they know.

Another Smartr feature compiles an automatic Twitter list of the accounts for all the people a user has recently emailed.

Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte said upcoming Smartr apps will include caller ID and map views, and described recent company hack projects such as a Facebook app that shows when two users first met and an Assassins-style game.

Bonus video: Does the new brand make anyone else think of “The Simpsons”? See below:

I am looking for a tablet that can run Outlook and all Microsoft Office programs, and connect to Microsoft server-based business programs. Is there anything now or in the near future with this functionality?

A:

Yes. While Windows 7 wasn’t designed primarily as a tablet operating system, it does support touch, and thus a number of companies sell tablets that run Windows 7, and therefore, presumably, the Windows software you mention. These companies include Acer, Asus, and ViewSonic. I haven’t tested any of these, because Microsoft’s true tablet operating system will be Windows 8, which is expected to be out next year.

Q:

I use Gmail. When I type the name of a correspondent, the email address shows up. However, if the correspondent has given me a new email address, the old one still shows up, which is totally confusing. How can I get rid of the old address?

A:

One way to do it is to either enter the person’s correct address in your Gmail contacts list, or edit the old one if that’s in the contact list.

You can get to the contacts list by clicking on “Contacts” in the left sidebar of Gmail. More information about Google contacts is here.

Q:

My wife and I love the simple photography-editing application on my Mac. Are there any apps that offer good basic photo-editing features for the iPad?

A:

There are many iPad apps that let you make simple edits to photos, though none that I know of with the editing power of a PC or Mac photo-editing program. One iPad app in this category that I have used and like is Adobe Photoshop Express. This app is free, though a package of extra features costs $5.

Write to Walt at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

Prior investors General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $10.4 million. Avalon’s Brady Bohrmann will join Backupify’s board.

I talked with CEO Rob May, who told me about his plan to accelerate marketing and adoption of Backupify by users of Google Apps, the search giant’s Web-based business suite of applications that is proving popular with businesses. So far, Backupify is being used to back up the files on 5,000 Google Apps domains. He says he would also like to offer Backupify for several other services that users have been requesting. In addition, May wants to boost Backupify’s visibility among the many third-party partners — like, say, Cloud Sherpas — who work with businesses deploying Google Apps.

The outfit is growing fast. It has 175,000 users and stores 200 terabytes of data for its users, not just from Google apps, but also from Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Blogger, and the Zoho Web-based office suite. One public customer is New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which uses Backupify to back up the Google Apps data generated by some 1,000 users. The data is all backed up to Amazon Web Services, but users can also download local copies of their data.

Why would you need to back up data that’s on a supposedly reliable cloud service? Because you might goof up — and delete something you didn’t mean to — just as easily in the cloud as on your PC. May says that roughly one-third of all data loss occurs because of user error. “We hear a lot of different things. When you delete something, Google assumes you meant to delete it. Sometimes things get deleted maliciously by a hacker, or someone who gets ahold of a password that wasn’t taken care of,” he says. “IT administrators want their own backup copy they can restore from. They trust Google not to lose it, but they don’t always trust their own users.”

Backupify’s $4.5 million A round was also led by Avalon and joined by General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital. Prior to that, First Round Capital led a $900,000 seed round, which was joined by Betaworks and several individual investors, including Chris Sacca and Jason Calacanis.

Let’s face it: Everyone in Silicon Valley — one way or another — fashions themselves as the next Steve Jobs.

And why not? Both the professional and even personal story of the legendary Apple CEO — which will be chronicled in November in a major book — are the stuff of tech legend and envy: Iconic, in charge, decisive, elegant, innovative, phoenix-like and visionary.

And, of course, more than just a little bit terrifying.

So why not Larry Page, too, and why not now?

One issue: By temperament and action — by which I mean genetically hyper-competitive and hammer-time aggressive — he’s been more like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has been the Yin to Jobs’ Yang in their deeply interconnected careers over the last decades.

As I wrote before Page took over again as Google’s CEO earlier this year:

After our first interview in 2001, my notes on the encounter had this one line underlined and in all caps:

LARRY PAGE=BILL GATES.

It was not meant as an insult, but I can tell you I never wrote such a note about Page’s co-founder, the jokey and affable Sergey Brin.

Even then, Gates had a fearsome reputation as a manically competitive exec, a cutting manner to those not as smart as he clearly is and a reputation as a very tough and often eviscerating boss. (And all that was also my experience whenever I was interviewing him.)

While much wonkier, friendlier and more of a sensitive new-aged male, Page, it seemed to me, had the exact same obvious drive and aggression as Gates.

The latest incarnation of that has been Page’s move — bold for now and we’ll-see later — to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, which Google announced yesterday.

By all accounts, Page was the key driver of the deal inside Google, where he now reigns firmly.

Although neither Gates nor Jobs has used acquisitions much as a key weapon in their arsenals, the size and scope of the deal is pure Gates: A focused, overwhelming and competitor-scaring display of might that speaks of industry dominance and play-to-destroy aspirations, masking what is also very reactive.

If Page’s doubling down on mobile reminds you a bit of Gates’s “Internet Tidal Wave” memorandum in 1995, that’s because the move-now tone is the same.

And, also, in that it is more than just a little bit sneaky. Case in point: Google’s yammering on about the importance of Motorola’s patents in the deal. While the patent love is true and an important element, bolstering Google’s own weak portfolio, it’s also a bit of a feint by the search giant, which can simply never come out and say what it is actually up to.

Which is to be the dominant and overwhelming player in the mobile market that Google sees as critical to its future.

“The company obviously wants everyone to focus on the patents, but its ambitions are so much larger in mobile,” said one person close to the situation. “So it underplays as it overplays.”

Indeed, in the time I covered Google, it has always been my experience when the search giant insists stringently on one thing, Page and others are playing a more complex version of “Star Trek” three-dimensional chess.

As the New York Times’ DealBook noted correctly:

If there’s any question about Google’s motivation to own a handset maker rather than just a portfolio of patents, consider this: InterDigital, a licensing company that owns some 8,000 wireless patents and has another 10,000 patent applications being processed, has been up for auction. Many industry insiders were sure that if Google were serious about acquiring a portfolio of patents, InterDigital would be its target. The company’s market value is only about $3 billion and it doesn’t come with all the baggage of Motorola’s handset business.

That’s exactly right, because Page’s ambition is about Google playing a big part in the mobile market — which is humanity’s next critical platform in computing — for its interlocked ecosystem of Google products — from its flagship search to social networking via Google+ to Gmail to its latest Google Wallet initiative to Google Maps to Google Voice.

In other words, it’s a Google world and we all just live in it.

At the heart of it is a desire to make and completely control the object at the center of the virtuous circle: The mobile device, whether it be a smartphone, tablet or whatever doodad you might wear around your neck.

In fact, as I also remember from Google’s earliest days, Page did sport a lot of such contraptions back then, such as a communicator of some sort he once joyfully showed off to me that allowed him to reach Brin quickly. Later, it was a kind of pollution sensor that took its place.

My recollection from that time was that Page adored such objects, visibly inspired by the idea of digital devices that delivered a myriad of helpful and smart services to users as they moved around the world.

You know, like an Apple iPhone, the ground-breaking technical achievement that Jobs rendered unto the world less than a decade ago, changing everything.

With Android and Page’s firm backing, Google quickly and smartly jumped partway into that market with its powerful and fast-growing mobile operating system.

Now, like Jobs, I have no doubt Page wants to own and control the whole value chain to solidify what Google started several years ago and which is its best hope to vault into the next era of computing.

It’s a leap that Gates and Microsoft largely failed at, not for lack of trying — something else Page has to have taken note of.

So, perhaps by making things — maybe even beautiful things like Jobs — Page will transform himself from a Gates into a Jobs.

Or, more likely, a little bit of both.

Until that reckoning, here is a terrific video of Spock playing 3D chess with Captain James T. Kirk — and, yes, he does look freakishly like Page here:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

Topify’s Arik Fraimovich is the latest of many developers to blame Twitter for his problems; he said in a blog post that the fact that Twitter recently removed without notice the email headers he used to power his service was the last straw.

He clarified via email, “The main reason behind the Topify shutdown isn’t the technical change [Twitter] did, but the lack of communication before and after they did it and feeling that they don’t care about the smaller developers.”

Topify was a nifty tool that helped users manage Twitter from their email inboxes. After users set up their Twitter notifications to be sent to a Topify-managed address, Topify would augment each email sent by Twitter with user profile and other information, then forward the notification to a user’s primary email addresses and respond to commands sent back via replies to the emails.

So, for instance, if someone followed you on Twitter, you’d get an email with details about who, exactly, she is, and could quickly reply to that email to follow her back (see screenshot below).

Companies and independent developers who build on top of Twitter have repeatedly dealt with obstacles like policy changes and direct competition from Twitter itself — for example, Twitter banned rival ad networks last spring and launched its own photo-hosting service earlier this summer. (A far more surprising story is to hear that a developer or outside investor is happy with the Twitter ecosystem!)

So how is Topify any different? Asked about Fraimovich’s complaints, Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson replied, “This is an unusual one, since headers included in emails sent by Twitter.com have never been documented/supported by the Twitter Platform, and are not part of the API.”

Twitter does provide support for some of the same functions through its beta Site Streams API, Fraimovich noted, and it has improved its own notification emails significantly in the two years since Topify launched.

However, Fraimovich argued in a developer discussion thread, that use of email headers “was a documented feature (at least in the old dev site) and not some hack.”

Fraimovich, who is based in Israel and co-founded Topify with Ouriel Ohayon, said he had intended to introduce a freemium model for Topify at some point but ultimately never made any money from the project. His costs were low, though, he said: Just server bills and his time.

Fraimovich recommended that Topify users looking for an alternative try a somewhat similar Gmail service called Rapportive.

Of course, Google itself has one billion monthly unique visitors and just a teensy bit of brand recognition, and it seeded its new network carefully. But Plus is invite-only. Just imagine what would happen if Google opened the floodgates by promoting Plus on all its products.

If we look back, Google actually did have a bigger social network launch in the past, but not organically: It rolled out Buzz as a feature of Gmail available to all users. (Google doesn’t say how many Gmail users there are, but it’s well into the millions.)

Facebook, by contrast, took more than two years to reach 10 million users, and only hit the milestone after opening its network beyond college and high-school students.

Facebook’s numbers are slightly different, because it only counts users who were active within the last month. But at this point, every single Google+ member has been active within the last month.

I’d like to cast a broader net for examples, if anyone has them, but I’m having trouble finding historical active user counts for fast-growing networks like Sina Weibo. We also know Twitter grew somewhat slowly out of the gate, but it has resisted disclosing official active user counts.

Products built on top of existing social networks, and ones built for virality rather than invite-only rollout, however, have the potential for a much faster growth curve. Zynga’s most recent launch, Empires & Allies, got to 10 million users in nine days, just slightly behind the pace of CityVille, according to Inside Social Games and AppData.

UberMedia CEO Bill Gross, whose company is currently most active in the Twitter ecosystem but will presumably also develop clients for Google+, recently predicted that Google+ would hit 100 million users faster than any service in history. Well, Google’s numbers don’t make that a reality yet, but there’s only 90 million to go!

Meanwhile, Page also said on Thursday that Google+ facilitates one billion items shared and received per day. We clarified with Google the way it calculated this number.

Essentially, each counted “share” is the number of people who potentially see any one item.

If a user shares a picture with a Google Circle of 40 people, that counts as 40 shares — even if all 40 people don’t actually look at the photo. If a user shares something publicly, it’s not counted.

Google said this is consistent with the way it counts sharing in Gmail and other products. However, it’s a bit of a tricky metric; at first glance it would be easy to think that Google means one billion items are posted to Google+ on a daily basis already — which it doesn’t.

One interesting side note about Google+ reaching 10 million users — the milestone had actually been estimated by an outside researcher using fascinating methodology. Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com who is now at FamilyLink, calculated the percent of the U.S. population that had signed up for Google+ by comparing user surnames to census data and extrapolating for international users. He estimated Google+ had 10 million users as of July 12 (two days before the second-quarter earnings announcement).

After earnings came out yesterday, Bradley Horowitz, the Google VP who coleads Plus development, gave credit to Allen in a Google+ post of his own. “BTW, +Paul Allen… Tip of the hat to you sir. Neat parlor trick. Statistics FTW!”

Photo credit: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA

It is in stealth mode no more. The company today took the wraps off at least some of its plans and revealed the closing of a $9.2 million Series A funding round that also includes investments from Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Levine is joining Bromium’s board.

Its founders are Gaurav Banga, the former CTO of Phoenix Technologies; Simon Crosby, the former CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Division of Citrix; and Ian Pratt, the current chairman of Xen.org and another Citrix veteran. Both Pratt and Crosby joined Citrix after it acquired the open source virtualization company Xensource in 2007.

Bromium is turning out to be a bit of a reunion of former Xensource execs: Frank Artale, a managing director at Ignition who was also a Xensource exec, is joining Bromium’s board as well.

So what does Bromium plan to do? It won’t say, but I got a few hints from Simon Crosby, Bromium’s CTO. “The timing of this is perfect to what is going on right now with all the attacks that have been going on recently,” he said.

The attacks against EMC’s RSA security products, and also on Google’s Gmail, he says, were carried out via the client — that is, end user devices like a PC, a smartphone or a tablet. “Bromium believes that getting to a secure era in cloud computing requires securing both the client and the cloud.”

And how to get there? Again, he wouldn’t say exactly, but he did point the way: Virtualization. The technique of creating numerous “virtual” computers that run concurrently on a single physical host computer has been a fundamental development in the evolution of cloud computing. “Everyone I think knows that virtualization can help with security, but no one has really delivered an elegant solution that enhances security through the use of virtualization,” Crosby told me. “This is where I think we can strike a blow for the good guys.”

For another hint, look at Intel’s recently closed acquisition of security software concern McAfee. “Intel gets that security needs to move closer to the hardware, and we would agree with that,” Crosby said. McAfee’s CTO, George Kurtz, is on Bromium’s board.

Bromium marks the second security start-up that Andreesen Horowitz has invested in recently. The other was Silver Tail Systems. And it probably won’t be the last. As AH founder Marc Andreesen said in his appearance with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D9, he loves security. Why? “The threats keep morphing.” Indeed they do.

Google this week said people operating in the country’s northeast infiltrated the email accounts of hundreds of Gmail users, including government and military personnel, activists and journalists. It was at least the third time since early last year that Google has fingered China as the origin of disturbances to its operations.

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In addition to offering speed improvements, the company is adding new features, such as the ability to respond to a Facebook message directly from within an email or see updates from Twitter. Some new features, such as the ability to view photo slideshows and YouTube videos from within an email are already part of rival services, such as Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail.

The revamped mail program, which has been in the works for about a year, also integrates instant messaging and text messages more deeply, archiving conversations by default. A built-in tool from YouSendIt is included for sending large files, with additional services built in for other tasks, such as tracking purchases or unsubscribing from bulk email. On the instant messaging front, users can now converse via Facebook Chat from within Yahoo Mail.

“Yahoo’s vision for online communications brings together all the tools that people use to connect–email, chat, SMS, and social updates–and makes it easier for them to share content and engage in conversations with the people that matter most to them,” Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving said in a statement.

Yahoo has been beta testing the new mail program since October. The company did a major overhaul of the mail service back in 2007.

Despite remaining the top email provider in the U.S. with close to 90 million accounts, Yahoo has been losing ground in recent years, dropping 7 percent in the U.S. and 1 percent globally over the last 12 months, according to ComScore.

On the mobile side, Yahoo said it is making a new version of its software available to Nokia. The Finnish cell phone maker signed a deal last year to have their email and chat features “powered by Yahoo.”

It’s a little surprising that even in today’s world of decoded genomes, retina scanning and 128-bit encryption that the doddering old signature continues to plod along as the primary method of identity verification.

But the concept of signing is about as ingrained in our culture as the handshake. We sign on the dotted line. We sign here. We sign there. We sign our life away.

And even DocuSign made its name porting that oldest of identity verification methods over to the digital world.

But last weekend, the software-as a-service provider did something it had never done before.

The company filled coolers with beer, rented a nacho machine and opened its doors to a bunch of hackers who would vie for $25,000 in prize money to build new uses for an old service.

That’s because the world has changed in the eight years since DocuSign started, and business services aren’t the only way forward now, at least according to Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Tom Gonser.

“From a strategic perspective, we are going to put a lot more effort on the consumer side of this business than we have in the past,” he said.

But according to it’s not really a problem of ink.

It’s one of paper.

Gonser explained: “In replacing paper, you have to integrate with any system that paper interacted with.”

And taking the paper out of the equation isn’t easy.

Paper is interoperable. And it’s the most readable file format–at least by humans.

So, to get its hands on more consumers makes sense for DocuSign, considering a good portion of them now carry touchscreens around in their pockets and a little white fob allows anyone to accept credit card payments, complete with signature.

The hackathon is DocuSign’s way to get a bunch of coders–who haven’t spent their lives thinking about enterprise software–together to solve the problems that modern living has with the decidedly unmodern signature.

When I stopped by, groups were picking away at projects that seemed like a pretty good cross section of all the places signatures enter our lives.

There was a plug-in for Google’s Gmail, a budding solution for signing NDA’s on the fly, a developer who wanted to end the paper permission slip for school activities and even someone trying to enable authors to digitally sign individual copies of e-books.

While the overall winner turned out to be the developer who worked on a solution for signing petitions, every one of the ideas seemed like a better alternative to what goes on today.

Here’s a quick video with Evan Jacobs, a former developer for Amazon, whose hackathon entry–Kindlegraph–allows authors to send a personal message and verifiable signature to an individual Amazon Kindle e-book reader.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110522/early-adopter-autograph-a-book-or-sign-a-permission-slip-all-electronically-at-the-docusign-hackathon/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110418/rims-blackberry-playbook-tablet-stands-a-chance%e2%80%a6in-2012/ http://allthingsd.com/20110418/rims-blackberry-playbook-tablet-stands-a-chance%e2%80%a6in-2012/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:30:18 +0000 Sarah Rotman Epps and Ted Schadler http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=39017 Business has changed since the first BlackBerry smartphone hit the enterprise in 2002. Individual workers, rather than CIOs and IT departments, have more influence now: Forrester’s data show that more than half of U.S. employees say they have better technology at home than at work, and 37 percent of U.S. information workers bring technology to the workplace that they use first at home. When it comes to tablets especially, there’s little distinction today between the enterprise and consumer market.

Here lies the challenge of Research In Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry smartphones and now, the PlayBook tablet: To conquer the enterprise–which has historically been RIM’s stronghold because of its White House-level security and lack of competition–it needs to sell tablets to consumers.

This isn’t impossible. Apple has had remarkable success selling the iPad to consumers and businesses. In a Forrester survey of U.S. consumers conducted in January 2011, 34 percent of iPad owners reported using their device at work. With enhanced security and dedicated support (“business specialists” at Apple Stores), we’ll see more companies join Mercedes-Benz and GE in buying iPads directly for their employees. But Apple’s success has come precisely because it puts consumers first. A typical statement we hear from executives at firms considering buying tablets is, “We’d really like a tablet that integrates better with our back-end systems, but we’re going with iPads because we want employees to like them.” Businesses care about how workers feel about technology.

Contrary to popular belief, RIM is pretty successful selling its devices to consumers, too. BlackBerry smartphone shipments, subscribers, and revenues continue to rise quarter after quarter, even in mature North American markets. Most important, BlackBerry consumer customers (“BlackBerry Internet Service,” or BIS) now outnumber BlackBerry enterprise customers (“BlackBerry Enterprise Service,” or BES).

But the PlayBook is a complicated product to sell to consumers. For starters, the “BlackBerry Bridge” feature, which displays email and BlackBerry messenger content only when in Bluetooth-range of a BlackBerry smartphone, has security appeal for CIOs but is potentially confusing to consumers. Yes, you can still get Web-based email like Gmail on the device, but there’s no native email application like there is on the iPad—and email is the No. 1 activity consumers do on tablets today. Second, compared with the iPad the PlayBook has relatively few native apps designed for the platform; it supports Android apps but only those designed for Gingerbread, not Honeycomb (not that there are many of those, either). Apps don’t matter to all tablet shoppers, but they do matter to some: 23 percent of consumers considering buying a tablet rank “Number of available apps” in their top-three criteria; 19 percent say the same about Flash support, which the PlayBook browser will have.

Whereas Apple owns its own channel–the Apple Store–to educate and sell the iPad to consumers, RIM will be relying on the Blue Shirts at Best Buy to sell its device, as well as its carrier partners and other local retailers (20,000 stores worldwide). It’s going to be a tough sell. While the PlayBook has dazzling performance and multitasking—for example, the ability to switch apps and keep a video or game running in the background—and solid hardware design, consumers will be comparing a first-generation PlayBook with a second-generation iPad. iPad will dominate tablet sales in 2011. But this is a marathon, not a sprint, and we see a path for RIM to gain market share in 2012. An improved version-two PlayBook must have native email, built-in security and more native apps for QNX, the RIM’s recently-acquired operating system for the PlayBook. To get there, RIM will need to port QNX to its smartphones to expand the platform’s reach and make it more appealing for developers.

Even so, the PlayBook’s appeal is likely limited to BlackBerry smartphone customers, and to win them over, RIM’s marketing execution needs to be flawless. With the recent departure of CMO Keith Pardy, RIM’s new leadership needs to step up and define and execute a vision for this product that puts consumers on par if not ahead of CIOs. Without that vision, RIM will have an expensive product failure on its hands.

Ted Schadler is a vice president and principal analyst and Sarah Rotman Epps is a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110418/rims-blackberry-playbook-tablet-stands-a-chance%e2%80%a6in-2012/feed/ 25 http://allthingsd.com/20110330/google-gets-a-like-button-users-can-recommend-search-results-with-1/ http://allthingsd.com/20110330/google-gets-a-like-button-users-can-recommend-search-results-with-1/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:46:09 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4973 Google today will start rolling out a social search feature it is calling +1. The product is much more limited than sharing tools from other services like Facebook, Twitter and Delicious, but since it will influence Google search results, it’s significant.

The basic +1 function allows users to recommend a Web page by clicking on a small +1 button next to search results. These votes are aggregated globally, but logged-in users will see the pictures and names of their connections who have “+1′ed” a link.

Just as with Facebook’s “like” button, all +1′s are public. But +1 doesn’t have the social feedback you might get by sharing a link on Facebook or Twitter, or the option to annotate links with your comments.

This is only rolling out gradually, though users can opt in to try +1 at www.google.com/experimental. It’s part of a larger effort to get Google users to start maintaining their Google Profiles–which are obviously key to the grand Google social plan.

For now, users can choose to make their +1′s available as a tab on their Google Profile, but there’s no activity stream that brings together friends’ likes.

Another limitation: right now +1 is only for users’ connections on Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Reader and Google Buzz. Support for connections on other services like Twitter is “coming soon.”

Yet another feature coming soon: +1 buttons for publishers, which they can add alongside the other colorful doodads for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, and perhaps even Google Buzz.

One feature that’s ready at launch is +1 for ads, a highly unusual move in Silicon Valley where monetization is usually relegated to a lower priority. +1 buttons will appear next to Google ads and show which users have clicked on them, just like +1 for search. Advertisers don’t have to pay for the feature but will get reporting on how many +1s they get.

Google already has multiple social search features currently rolled out, and has experimented with users voting on search results in the past through tools like Google SearchWiki (which is no longer available).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110330/google-gets-a-like-button-users-can-recommend-search-results-with-1/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110320/china-is-messing-with-gmail-says-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20110320/china-is-messing-with-gmail-says-google/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2011 05:27:44 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4448 Google is explicitly blaming the Chinese government for the unreliability of its Gmail service over the past month for users in China. The company on Sunday issued a statement to multiple outlets: “Relating to Google there is no issue on our side. We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail.” The alleged meddling is thought to be related to online activism in China inspired by the recent spate of pro-democracy protests in the Middle East. Last year Google started redirecting Chinese users to its Hong Kong search engine, citing Chinese censorship and hacking.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110320/china-is-messing-with-gmail-says-google/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110315/google-makes-it-easy-to-try-new-apps-right-away-or-not/ http://allthingsd.com/20110315/google-makes-it-easy-to-try-new-apps-right-away-or-not/#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:00:21 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3993 IT managers crave stability because new applications and features have a tendency to create chaos. If you’ve ever worked in an office where the IT manager hasn’t upgraded to the latest version of this or that application, you’ve probably seen that craving in action. New things can have unintended consequences, and so don’t get deployed until they’ve been tested–which in some places doesn’t happen until long after they’re new.

Cloud applications like those found in Google Apps are a little different. Since everything works within the browser, there are fewer, if any, things that are likely to break when a new app or feature gets introduced. And Google likes nothing more than pushing the latest shiny things–new features and apps–to its users as soon as they’re ready. Not all IT managers are cool with that, however, because it forces them to get familiar with the new apps and features before they’re ready to field questions about them from their users.

Today, Google is making it possible to choose between being an early adopter or taking a more careful approach by giving Google Apps administrators a two-track deployment approach. One track, known as Rapid Release, gives users access to new apps and features as soon as Google rolls them out.

The second track is known as Scheduled Release, and gives admins a week to familiarize themselves with new apps and then allow their users to get them on a weekly basis, with updates taking place every Tuesday. Google says new features for GMail, Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Sites will follow this new release schedule going forward.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110315/google-makes-it-easy-to-try-new-apps-right-away-or-not/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110309/gmail-acknowledges-not-all-emails-are-the-same/ http://allthingsd.com/20110309/gmail-acknowledges-not-all-emails-are-the-same/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:00:19 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4099 Gmail today is launching a feature called Smart Labels that automatically categorizes bulk (aka newsletters), notification and forum (aka group mailing list) emails and in some cases moves them out of the main inbox. This idea of automatic sub-inboxes isn’t new; it’s actually something that Facebook Messages does too–separate personal email from mass email. Smart Labels adds to the company’s widely deployed Priority Inbox sorting tool. The feature could have interesting implications for the notification emails from social Web and daily sites that flood many of our inboxes, giving them less prominence than they have now. But Smart Labels aren’t a default, they’re a Gmail Labs feature that users have to turn on manually.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110309/gmail-acknowledges-not-all-emails-are-the-same/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110223/motorolas-xoom-starts-tablet-wars-with-ipad/ http://allthingsd.com/20110223/motorolas-xoom-starts-tablet-wars-with-ipad/#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 02:01:36 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1785 After months of speculation, the tablet wars begin in earnest this week. Motorola is releasing its Xoom tablet on Feb. 24, and I consider it the first truly comparable competitor to Apple’s hit iPad. That is partly because it is the first iPad challenger to run Honeycomb, an elegant new version of Google’s Android operating system designed especially for tablets.

Both Motorola’s hardware and Google’s new software are impressive and, after testing it for about a week, I believe the Xoom beats the first-generation iPad in certain respects, though it lags in others. Like the iPad, the Xoom has a roomy 10-inch screen, and it’s about the same thickness and weight as the iPad, albeit narrower and longer. And, like the iPad’s operating system, Honeycomb gives software the ability to make good use of that screen real estate, with apps that are more computer-like than those on a smartphone.

The Xoom has a more potent processor than the current iPad; front and rear cameras versus none for the iPad; better speakers; and higher screen resolution. It also can be upgraded free later this year to support Verizon’s faster 4G cellular data network (though monthly fees may rise.)

Motorola is taking aim at the iPad just as Apple is expected to announce, next week, a second-generation of its tablet. Little is known about this second iPad, but it’s widely expected to take away at least one of the Xoom’s advantages over the original iPad—cameras—and is rumored to be thinner and lighter, since weight was one of the most common complaints about the generally praised first iPad.

The iPad has way more tablet-specific apps—around 60,000 versus a handful—and, in my tests, much better battery life. Plus, whatever the specs say, it’s a fast device with a beautiful screen that delights people daily. But, overall, the Xoom with Honeycomb is a strong alternative to the original iPad, and one that will only improve over time.

The Xoom’s screen is long and narrow, good for widescreen video.

Unfortunately for consumers looking for iPad alternatives, the Xoom has an Achilles’ heel: price. While iPads come in a range of models priced all the way up to $829—none of which requires a cellphone contract—Apple’s entry price for the iPad is just $499. By contrast, the base price of a Xoom without a cellphone contract is $800—60% more. And even with a Verizon two-year contract at $20 to $80 a month—depending on the data limit you choose—the least you can pay for a Xoom is $600, or 20% more before counting the contract costs.

In fairness, the iPad model with the same memory as the Xoom and a 3G cellular modem like the Xoom’s is $729, which is a closer comparison. But it is still less than $800, and consumers still focus on that $499 iPad entry price (for a Wi-Fi-only model.)

As much as I like the Xoom and Honeycomb, I’d advise consumers to wait to see what Apple has up its sleeve next before committing to a higher price for the Motorola product.

Meanwhile, here’s what I found in testing the Xoom.

Hardware

Though it works fine in portrait, or vertical, mode, the Xoom is mainly designed as a landscape, or horizontal, device. The screen is long and narrow, proportioned to best fit widescreen video. The HD screen boasts a resolution of 1280 by 800, versus 1024 by 768 for the iPad.

It felt heavier than the iPad, though the weight of 1.6 pounds is the same as on the cellular version of the Apple product. Overall, it has a solid, high-quality feel. There aren’t any physical buttons except for an on-off switch at the rear and volume controls on an edge. The common Android home, back and other buttons are rendered in the software. The glass on the front is surrounded by a relatively thin black border.

I found it generally comfortable to hold, except when I was reading for long periods in vertical mode, where the long, thin shape and weight made it feel a bit unbalanced.

I performed the same battery test on the Xoom as I have on other tablets. I played video constantly with the connectivity turned on and the screen at almost full brightness until the battery died. Alas, while the Xoom claims up to 10 hours of video playback, I got just 7 hours and 32 minutes. By contrast, on the same test, the iPad, which also claims 10 hours, logged 11.5 hours, or four hours more.

I also tested the Xoom’s front-facing 2-megapixel camera by performing a video chat with a Motorola employee using Google Talk software. The chat broke up or froze several times over Verizon’s network, but we eventually got it to work pretty well on Wi-Fi.

The Xoom’s battery is sealed, and it only comes with 32 gigabytes of memory, versus a range of between 16 and 64 GB for various models of the iPad. However, it has a slot for a memory card that Motorola says will work after a software upgrade to add more memory. There is also a removable back and a SIM card slot that would be used only if you chose to upgrade to 4G in the second quarter of this year.

Software

Perhaps even more impressive than the hardware is the Honeycomb software, which, for now, Google won’t offer on cellphones, only tablets, of which the Xoom is the first.

I’ve always felt that Android had a rough-around-the edges, geeky feel, with too many steps to do things and too much reliance on menus. But Honeycomb eliminates much of that. Actions like composing emails, or changing settings are much more obvious and quicker. The smart but cluttered notification bar has been moved to the lower right and simplified. A tap on it pops up relevant information.

There is still a separate email app for Gmail, as opposed to other email services you may use. But, now, as on the iPad, email is presented in multiple columns and is more attractive and easier to use.

The browser is especially impressive, with PC-like features, such as visible tabs for open pages and the ability to open a private browsing session. Apps like Maps and YouTube have 3-D views. There’s a movie-editing app and live widgets for the home screens that show email previews or video frames.

There are some downsides. The ability to play Flash video—a big Android selling point—won’t work on the Xoom at launch. It will take some weeks to appear. And I found numerous apps in the Android Market that wouldn’t work with the Xoom. I couldn’t locate a working video download or rental service, though Google says these will be available soon.

Some apps for phones, like the popular game Angry Birds, filled the screen beautifully and worked fine.

Bottom line: The Xoom and Honeycomb are a promising pair that should give the iPad its stiffest competition. But price will be an obstacle, and Apple isn’t standing still.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

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