I’m with you. I just want an easy place to check my email when wandering around. I don’t care for the big cell phones (iPhone, Windows mobile, crackberry, etc.), but like a very small flip phone. With Google mobile, I can check all my email without any big hassles. What’s cool about Google is you can set it up to reply as if it came from the email address it collected (I have 3 right now). And it’s fast. I can load the application and pull down all my email in less than 20 seconds fast. And I can T9 pretty darn fast for a quick reply.

I’m thinking about using an iPod touch as my laptop substitute when traveling. Great ideas here:
http://lifehacker.com/399619/forget-the-iphone++the-ipod-touch-is-good-enough

While you might like to think Zimbra Desktop is a dog, it may only be a dog (or a pig) to you because you haven’t realized yet it’s a workhorse. The product is called Zimbra Desktop, not Zimbra. It’s ironic that you complain it’s an offline browser for an online world, given that Zimbra itself is all about being online, and Zimbra Desktop was only developed as an off-line component.

If you want to try out “Zimbra” itself, you can free-of-charge with some of the orgs on Zimbra’s hosting provider list, like 01.com, who has auto-activation.

Zimbra does not require Zimbra Desktop. An open-source based groupware server, Zimbra is a competitor to Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange. You can access your Zimbra mailbox, including mail, calendars, contacts, files, task lists and more stuff, right through the web, and unlike Google Apps, it feels like a true application, with drag-and-drop functionality.

It syncs with most smart phones, including activesync support for over-the-air sync with iPhones, and native blackberry bes support. And it syncs with desktop software, unlike Google Apps, syncing calendars, contacts, tasks and email with Outlook. Unlike Exchange, it also syncs well with the Mac side, although I use it with Thunderbird as my client on both Mac and Windows, which syncs calendars using CalDav and the Lightning extension.

Zimbra Desktop was originally meant to work with Zimbra, as the off-line client for Zimbra’s web access, although Zimbra Desktop can be used independently, as you have delighted. Where you might fault Yahoo! is in trying to take excellent software made for one thing, and arbitrarily introducing it to a wider audience for another without anticipating your review. You can’t blame them for trying though, Zimbra Desktop is a first, pushing the limit of what can be done offline within a browser, and Yahoo! needs some firsts, and it probably does need to showcase Zimbra.

How best to showcase Zimbra? I don’t know. I’m a nerd, not a marketeer.

Man, you seem to have gone into a slumber for last 20 yrs and maybe just woke up. Gmail has nothing innovative other than conversation and its AJAX. In fact, they did nothing in the last 5 yrs which could call “innovative”. Go ahead and take Zimbra for a test ride and decide for yourself

And BTW, how the hell are you going to read your emails when you are offline ? Pls post here when Gmail allows you do that … oh I know, you dont care about it but I am damn sure that you will be the first one calling out how innovative google is when it introduces an offline client … let us say a bit too late in the game …