Evernote for Gmail: my favourite note-taking tool gets even better

For years, Evernote has been a lifesaver to me, helping me to take quick notes, save articles I want to read later, and keeping my notes  synced across devices. And now, this great tool has gotten better with the introduction of Evernote for Gmail.

A list of my must-have apps includes Evernote, as I am regularly searching out information that I stored away donkey years ago, as well as adding new information to it. When I got the email announcing Evernote for Gmail, I literally jumped in excitement.

Let me share the key points about this new integration.

So much of your life is in your inbox: messages, attachments, ideas, lists, goals. Don’t let the important communication stuff from friends and co-workers get lost in the shuffle—bring it all into Evernote.

Evernote for Gmail lets you take what matters out of your inbox and into a distraction-free workspace where you can curate your content, add context, and stay focused.

Benefits of Evernote for Gmail

With Evernote for Gmail you can:

Focus on what matters – move your emails into Evernote so they don’t get buried under inbox overload.

Write better emails – find your Evernote content fast to write better emails without extra effort.

Save time – keep emails in Evernote and easily find them when you need them.

Stay organized – store your content the way you want in Evernote.

Collect and collaborate – save important emails into notes and share them as public links to Evernote.

Best of all, you can do all this and more—right from Gmail.

With the Evernote for Gmail add-on, you can put your important emails where you do your important work and get more done.

Adding Evernote to Gmail

This new handy tool that has been added to Evernote sounds like what I needed to make the app even better for my use.

So I quickly installed it right from the comfort of my mobile phone, and with a few taps, I was good to go.

I gave it an initial access period of 30 days. There are other options, including for a week or a year. You can also revoke Gmail access at any time.

Now, whether I am on desktop or mobile, I can save and share important emails to Evernote without leaving Gmail. An Evernote add-on icon shows up at the bottom of an email you are reading. Tap it to see options to save to Evernote.

For example, I am subscribed to a number of newsletters that I am constantly learning from, I can save away key thoughts, concepts and information to Evernote right from inside Gmail.

I get an important update? Tap to save to Evernote. I can read them later by opening the Evernote app. And anytime I switch to a new device, I have all my notes synced over as always.

Brilliant work, guys. Brilliant.

If you already use Evernote (available for Windows, Android and iOS), or you are interested in trying it out, click here to learn more about Evernote for Gmail.

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This is the best selfie camera phone of 2019, and you should get one

The best selfie camera phone of 2019 is here with a selfie camera that is as good as the one at the back. All true selfie lovers and Insta celebs ought to be scrambling to get one.

I regularly rant about how selfie cameras are a scam when pitted against the main camera on a phone. The picture quality of the former never matches with that of the latter. But in an age in which we take more selfies than any other kind of photos, a selfie camera that is as good as the rear camera is going to be a welcome development. And it is Samsung Mobile that pulled it off.

Samsung Galaxy A80 is the best selfie camera phone of 2019

The new Samsung Galaxy A80 has the ultimate selfie camera. How did they do it and what makes it the best selfie camera phone today? Simple: Samsung designed it with only one camera in the phone – a 48 MP triple camera that slides up and rotates forward for selfies. Have a look at this short video:

Samsung says it is epic on both sides. I agree. Why sould I settle for lower grade photos when I need to take pictures of me? Bring this on, please. If you are keen on having the best selfie camera of 2019, this is it for now and will be a little difficult to beat.

The triple camera has a 48 MP main lens, an 8 MP ultra-wide angle lens with 123° field of view, as well as a 3D ToF lens, so we are looking at a very versatile camera here.

The Galaxy A80 has the best selfie camera of 2019

But Samsung isn’t the first to pull off a rotating camera. Not too long ago, back in 2013, OPPO Mobile had a rotating camera on the OPPO N1.

But this is 2019, and Samsung has me drooling at the A80. The perfect selfie camera, and it is wrapped up in a metal frame and glass on both sides.

The triple camera setup promises great photos and the camera will swing to face you when you choose the selfie mode. The promise of great photographs is one thing; the cool factor is another. Until another manufacturer pulls off something better than what we see here, the Galaxy A80 has the best selfie camera of 2019.

Someone is going to raise some concern about the durability of those sliding and rotating mechanisms on the A80. This is not the first time we are seeing such features on smartphones and they have worked well. This is a premium device and I have no doubts that Samsung have tested those moving parts through and through.

Look on the bright side: If those moving parts do fail, you can as well sure them and make a few millions off the situation. LOL. Don’t take my word for it though: I am no legal authority.

Beyond the camera

There is more to the A80 than the rotating camera though. It has the new, Snapdragon 730 super processor, 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of internal storage (there is no memory card slot), a huge 6.7-inch display, a cool in-display fingerprint scanner, as well as a 3700 mAh battery and fast charging.

Samsung Galaxy A80 is also known as Samsung Galaxy A90, but don’t ask me why.

And it runs Samsung’s new One UI. Yay! If you haven’t experienced One UI, you are missing out on the best user experience on a smartphone today. In addition to its very human-friendly interface, One UI includes a built-in Night Mode. So, not only are you getting the best selfie camera, but also the best user experience.

It will cost you $730 or about NGN250,000 to own a Samsung A80, but those glorious selfies and having a really cool smartphone will make it worth the spend. It will go on sale from May 2019.

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MWC 2019: Our planet is dying - is it time to ditch Mobile World Congress?

This year, my flight from London’s Stansted Airport to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, plus two days of hour-and-a-half commutes through horrendous traffic between my hotel and the conference venue on a half-empty fume-belching diesel bus, generated at least 0.24 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

But it was probably more than that. In order for me to spend time in Barcelona this week, a vast, continent-spanning logistics operation was pressed into service, seamlessly and efficiently, but at such environmental cost! Technology companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on building materials for stands – some as big as a decent-sized family home – that otherwise would not have existed and will be torn down at the end of the week.

Then there’s my paper metro ticket, my receipts for lunch, the countless cardboard coffee cups, the plastics in my badge, the unwanted extra fabric lanyard (handed to me by Ericsson when I walked onto their stand covered in Huawei branding), the free pens and little presents tech vendors like to foist on the press corps, all consumed resources that did not need to be consumed.

Oh, I ate a lot of tapas, and I do love pa amb tomàquet – the Catalan speciality of bread smeared with tomatoes and often served with ham – so several pigs died for me, too. They were delicious.

I am a technology reporter at Mobile World Congress, and I am also an environmental villain.

Of course you can always make the argument that that plastic would have been used and consumed anyway, those pigs would still have died, Ryanair flight FR9810 would still have taken off without me, my hosts would still have rented a half empty coach for 12 journalists, and a driver with an apparently magnetic attraction to traffic jams.

So why am I bothered?

A carbon neutral MWC?

The GSMA – the mobile trade body that runs and organises the show – makes a virtue out of Mobile World Congress being a sustainable, carbon neutral event. It enables attendees to offset their carbon emissions by donating to green projects. It also provides a number of recommendations to enable attendees to minimise their environmental footprint, and it can boast a number of laudable achievements. The GSMA is taking sensible, rational steps, and I don’t want to suggest for a moment that they are not trying very hard.

But the GSMA’s actions don’t go far enough. There is no compulsion for attendees to offset their carbon emissions (and carbon offsetting is, in my opinion, pointless – the carbon was still emitted), it is not a requirement to take public transport to the venue, you can still print out your schedules rather than download the app, you don’t have to choose locally grown or sourced food options, and unless you’re coming from elsewhere in Spain, or possibly parts of France, you’re still going to fly.

The GSMA claims that Mobile World Congress was carbon neutral in 2015 and 2016. But was it? Really? When every variable is accounted for, I’d say that was highly, highly improbable.

What’s the point?

So I’d like us to at least begin to discuss the possibility that Mobile World Congress simply isn’t necessary, and as increasing speed, capacity, and capabilities of networks prove, travel for any reason other than personal growth and enrichment, that is to say, business travel, is becoming less necessary.

Okay, you’re right, Mobile World Congress is a fun couple of days. We meet, greet, catch up, learn, drink into the small hours…. These are good things (mostly) and their loss will be keenly felt. But nobody said the transition to a post-carbon economy would be without pain and loss. Nobody said that saving our home from catastrophic climate meltdown and ecological breakdown would not require radical actions.

And with temperatures back home in the UK hitting 20⁰ centigrade in February, ice melt speeding up by every measure, and the biosphere quite literally dying around us, I’d argue the time to take radical actions is now.

Which side are you on?

When you’re weighing up seven billion human lives and the preservation of a habitable planet for future generations, radical choices don’t seem so radical. The solutions to climate meltdown are right in front of us – we just need the popular will and the political backing to implement them. Would you rather your descendants lived in the utopian Star Trek future, or the barbaric Mad Max future?

So I’d like to ask you to ask yourself a few things. Why do we need Mobile World Congress? What social good does it serve? What ecological benefit does it bring? The GSMA talks so much about the power of social good and sustainability, and how mobile will solve these problems.

And yet, and yet, every February 100,000 people descend on Barcelona, snarling up the streets, choking the azure Mediterranean sky, and consuming, consuming, consuming.

Why?

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MWC 2019: Robots, robots and robots, oh my!

All the world loves robots, and when they are robots holding something a human might hold, doing an activity a human might do, and preferably doing it while looking a bit like a human (two legs, arms, a smiley cartoon face, etc) the world loves them even more.

And at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, it felt like you couldn’t move without bumping into a robot doing something a human can do. There were dancing robots, drumming and piano-playing robots, packing robots and even a barista robot.

What’s 5G got to do with it?

The idea behind all these robotic demos is that the advent of 5G mobile networks in the not-too distant future will really kick-start the robotics revolution.

Operators promise 5G will bring vastly increased speeds, vastly reduced latency, and vastly improved possibilities around edge computing. This will create a perfect storm (if you’re a robot) for robots, because it enables them to accomplish more tasks, quicker, and with even greater precision than was already possible.

That’s the claim, anyway. The reality seems to be a little more clunky – let’s just say the dancing robot posed absolutely no threat to Anton du Beke, the packing robot made more mistakes than a tired Amazon warehouse worker who hasn’t been to the loo for eight hours, and the drumming robot … well … it might have been the best drummer in the Beatles.

Coffee to go

But one robot in particular caught the eyes of the thousands and thousands of Congress-goers feeling the strain the morning after an intense ‘networking’ session.

On the Korea Telecom (KT) stand at the GSMA’s Innovation City showcase, thirsty punters availed themselves of the services of dal:komm’s Beat, a 5G-enabled robotic barista.

Using a smartphone application, users place their order in advance, then watch as the robot swings into action, whirling around, grinding, pouring, frothing and icing. When your coffee is ready, you simply approach the booth, type in a unique pin, and Beat delivers your drink through a self-service hatch.

Backed by KT’s 5G base stations, Beat’s human controllers monitor the robot in as near to real-time as makes no difference, checking in to see if something needs repairing, or if the bean supply is running low.

Unlike human baristas, who generally do not connect themselves to networks, edge-based compute power means Beat can prepare three coffees at once, up to 90 per hour, and if left idle with nobody looking at it, it even becomes its own marketing department, waving its arm to attract attention and flashing happy emojis at passers-by. Beat that, underpaid service industry workers!

Humans under threat?

So do robots have a future in the high-stakes world of coffee preparation? I’m not so sure – for while my iced Americano was a much-needed treat on a busy afternoon, Beat completely forgot to write my name on the side of the cup in black marker pen, and that’s not easily forgivable. Baristas of the world, I think your jobs are safe for now.

This is Alice Scotts Town, reporting from Barcelona, for Computer Weekly…

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Is open source lock-in possible?

Earlier this week, open source software company Suse announced that it is strengthening its presence in the Asia-Pacific region following its acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus.

Well-known for its Suse Linux distro that got me into Linux during my student years, Suse faces strong competition from its bigger US rival Red Hat.

The two open source software companies have similar offerings, starting with Linux for the infrastructure piece, to container orchestration and OpenStack in the platform layer. But unlike Red Hat, which has Red Hat Ansible under its fold, Suse does not appear to have a commercial version of the Ansible open source automation tool.

In its public communications on its APAC expansion plans, Suse took the chance to stake the claim that it is now the industry’s largest independent open source company – in light of Red Hat’s impending acquisition by IBM.

During a recent meeting with Suse executives, Andy Jiang, Suse’s vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan, touted the company’s independence and claimed it would not lock users into its platform unlike other open source rivals.

While Jiang did not provide specific examples of how its rivals were locking in enterprises, any open source company that does so will be going against the ethos of free and open source software, that is, users have the freedom to choose an open source vendor and switch suppliers easily if things don’t work out.

Of course, as commercial open source software vendors, the likes of Red Hat and Suse are concerned with profitability and have the right to employ ways to maintain their customer base.

But they should base those efforts on their innovation chops and strength of their service and support offerings, and not try to lock a user to their platform – like Apple does with its ecosystem. After all, isn’t open source software supposed to be open and interoperable regardless of which platform you choose?

Have you been locked into – or felt like you were being locked into – an open source platform by a commercial open source vendor? Tell us more in the comments!

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Microsoft open sources Accessibility Insights

The term accessibility might read better if the English language had decided to spell it accessability — or perhaps even access-ability — given its use to describe products or services or environments designed to easy to use by people with disabilities.

As an adjective, accessible means easy to approach, reach, enter, speak with, or use — and a ‘thing’ that can be used, entered, reached etc.

Microsoft is now open sourcing the code in its Accessibility Insights zone to allow developers to fix accessibility issues earlier in the dev cycle.

GM for developer services at Microsoft Keith Ballinger says that this open source shunt sees Microsoft offer a set of two free tools for developers.

Built on Deque’s open source axe technology (from the axe accessibility project), Accessibility Insights can run as standalone tools, or programmers can integrate the rules engine into their own build process.

“We’re on a journey to design, build, and launch more accessible products to foster inclusion. That’s why we created Accessibility Insights, a first step in developing tools that help developers address accessibility issues early in the design process. Our aim with Accessibility Insights is not to reinvent the wheel, but to modernise existing technology and optimise it for use in developer workflows,” said Ballinger.

Ballinger also notes that this is a part of a “much larger” inclusion effort by Microsoft.

Why open source?

On this point, Ballinger pays lip service to Redmond’s [unquestionably impressive] general efforts in this space, but says nothing too specific.

Deque Systems is one of the first contributors, providing GitHub issue filing for Accessibility Insights for web and colour contrast detection heuristics for Accessibility Insights for Windows.

Microsoft, for its part, has contributed its Windows rules engine to the axe accessibility project, the intention being to hel the axe engine cover all major platforms.

Find Microsoft code repositories on GitHub at: https://github.com/Microsoft/accessibility-insights-windows and https://github.com/Microsoft/accessibility-insights-web

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