Tom Goskar » Google

Google Mail is becoming Gmail in the UK – just don’t change if you use Android

Tom — Fri, 07 May 2010 15:40:25 +0000

As the title of this post says, UK Googlemail users can now change their email address from ..@googlemail.com to ..@gmail.com. If I remember correctly, there was a trademark issue with “Gmail” in the UK, but it looks like this has now been resolved.

I decided to change my Googlemail account to use the .gmail domain name. However, as soon as I did this, my Android phone (which is linked to my Google account) began to get a little cross. The Android Market stopped working, and I kept getting a Google Talk error (even though I don’t use it). I decided to remove the Google account from my phone and add it back in. However, my phone warned me that I would have to reset the whole phone in order to do this! Just for changing to gmail.com? I don’t think it’s worth the effort.

So I have reverted to @googlemail.com and everything has returned to normal. I might wait a little while before I try that again…

Google Storage

Tom — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:53:07 +0000

A few weeks ago, Google announced that they had dropped their prices for extra Gmail and Picasa storage. You can now buy 20GB for $5USD/year (about £3 at today’s exchange rate), which is very cheap indeed.

Their full price list (which goes up to 16TB) is as follows:

20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)
400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)
1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)
2 TB ($512.00 USD per year)
4 TB ($1,024.00 USD per year)
8 TB ($2,048.00 USD per year)
16 TB ($4,096.00 USD per year)

Now Google, when are you going to release a proper Google Drive application, hmm? In the meantime, there are several apps that can use Gmail as a drive (and there’s GmailFS and others) but wouldn’t it be nice to use a supported, official method of using all that storage beyond email, attachments and photos?

Embedding Google Maps Just Became Easier

Tom — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:53:52 +0000

Embedding a Google Map into your website just became much, much easier. Gone are the days of signing up for an API key and fumbling through the “Hello World” example, just so that you can show directions to your house. It’s now as easy as embedding a YouTube video – all done with a snippet of code.

Here’s a nice aerial view of Stonehenge:

View Larger Map

Read the full scoop over at Google LatLong.

Expect Google Maps to become rather ubiquitous from now on…