Although the past weeks have been all about Apple, especially in the mobile department, Research In Motion (RIM) quietly released their released its first fiscal quarter 2011 results. And in them, there was nothing but good things. For one, the largest smartphone manufacturer grew 24% over the same quarter last year to $4.24 billion, and more »

There are plenty of good practices to pick up when working with a computer. However, it’s really easy to fall into traps by being lazy. Take a look at this list. Do you have lousy tech habits? The first step is identifying your problem. Next, is finding a solution.

Welcome to a brand new feature on Gadgetell.com. A friend of ours, Scott McGrath is a systems administrator for a small IT consulting firm in the United States. What does that mean? He’s gotten a lot of requests for help. Unfortunately, a lot of problems are of the PEBKAC variety (“problem exists between keyboard and chair”). Take a look into “The Bottom of the Support Queue.”

Back in January, Peek, the e-mail and texting handheld device, was on sale for $299.95 complete with lifetime e-mail service for one day only. Right now, you can get a Peek with lifetime service for $399.99 at Costco. The offer runs out in 10 days on March 22, 2009. The device normally costs only $50. The lifetime service charge is approximately $350. That’s equivalent to a little under 18 months of service if you buy the Peek under normal circumstances.

GMail is suffering yet another outage and Google officials say it could last as long as 36 hours for some people. The outage started early this morning, and while Google says the problem was partially fixed for some people, an undetermined amount still are without access to their email. Google has so far declined to explain what caused this latest outage but a spokeman did explain why they often take so long to fix:

Asked why some Gmail outages last more than 24 hours, Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google’s Enterprise, told IDG News Service in November 2008 that those instances are “very rare.”

“Where there are problems is in the cases where we can’t fail that user over [to the backup] for whatever reason — there’s an error with the account, or the master and the slave [copies] are out of sync. So in a few circumstances, we have been unable to fail a user over and we can’t restore that user’s access to the service until we restore that physical location. This is an area where we’re constantly getting better and some of the things we’ve done as a result of our learnings over the last few months address that,” he added.

GMail has been plagued with numerous outages. In August 2008 the users of the service suffered through three separate outages. The first, on August 6th, affected Apps Premier users, who were hit with another outage on August 15th. The third outage occurred on August 11th and also affected AP members. Then in October another outage hit, knocking out email service for 30 hours. The latest was just 2 weeks ago when a major outage cut most of GMail’s users off from their email for nearly 3 hours.

Have you ever lost an Internet connection, but needed to desperately check for e-mail? I’m sure many of us have experienced this and wished there was some way to check e-mail offline. Enter Offline Gmail, a handy lab feature that allows you to check for mail, send, search, and label mail – all offline.

Basically, Google uses their Gears program to save and download a cached version of your mail. Even without Internet access, you just have to go to your browser, type in Gmail.com, and the cached files load because it is saved on your hard drive. Nifty huh? Check out the video after the break.

“What email? I didn’t get any email?” Have you ever been fed that line and wonder if the person is telling the truth? Unless you have the same type of e-mail program, it is unlikely that you can check whether they have read an e-mail or not. Expect for that to all change now that the BigString Corporation has launched their universal e-mail tracking service.

Finally, Google’s Gmail (still in Beta, grrrr) has added tasks for users today. Available in Google Labs, users can add tasks to their main e-mail screen and begin using the program right away. It is typical Google in every fashion.

What does typical Google mean? Simple. Users wishing to make an e-mail a task to complete need only hit shift + “T” and the task is created. The Tasks addition is a pretty bare bones offering but that is where Google finds success.

Tired of the blue on white theme you’ve been living with for years? Finally, it looks like we are getting more themes than I ever expected from the fine folks at Google. The themes are being propagated to users in a process that usually takes days to get to everyone. The themes are controlled in more »

In a very interesting move, the Peek e-mail device added some features last night that make it more of a compelling product in my mind. In addition to picking this up now for the reduced price of $79.99 from folks like Target, the device can now send text messages to phones. I am now considering more »