Its so weird how fast history is forgotten. Gmail was a galactic leap forward in terms of mail clients. At school there was a grey market to sell gmail invites at 20 dollars per

It really is. Things get comfortable and people assume that's always how it was.

Like cell phones. Wow, over a decade of them and if you had one 15 years ago you were considered a early adapter, and 20 years ago you were way ahead the curve. If you had one in the 90's, wow.

Still, mobile computer in your pocket, wow.

> Still, mobile computer in your pocket, wow.

it really bothers me, you know?

we've got so much storage and so many/good sensors, yet the software kinda pushes you to use the device for watching dumb videos and/or to argue worthlessly with other random people, so that you can get served ads in the meantime.

I dunno, mine sees tons of use as a:

- Calculator

- Bill-paying device

- Flashlight (soooooo much use as a flashlight)

- Thermostat adjuster ("smart" thermostats saved us running a wire for a second-floor zone, so, whatever, we've got them, they're OK)

- Level

- Document scanner

- Note taking/reading device

- Timer (kitchen; any board or party game that has an hourglass that you've misplaced)

- iPod-alike for the car (replaces burned CDs)

- Alarm clock

- Takeout/delivery orderer

- Check depositing device

- Shopping list displayer

- Navigation aid

- Taxi hailer

- Probably other stuff I'm forgetting

I don't think I'm even particularly "in to" using it as much as some people do—I can't bring myself to trust Apple Pay to work, so it doesn't replace my wallet and in fact I think I've only used that feature once ever; I don't really game on it; I read on an e-ink reader or on a huge iPad, not my phone; I don't do any "smart home" stuff aside from the thermostat; my use of Siri is limited to setting reminders and alarms, and putting addresses into navigation to save having to type them; in about a decade of smartphone ownership I think I can count the movies or episodes of something that I've watched on my phone on one hand; I don't do workout tracking or any of that sort of thing.

[EDIT] oh, right, camera, obviously. It replaces the family camera and camcorder of my youth, completely.

What else do you think people ought to do with them? They're pretty small, so e.g. reading a book is a bit difficult, and using them as general purpose computers is difficult because they lack a keyboard (and thus an easy way to program them).

Symbian and PocketPC phones.

> Gmail was a galactic leap forward in terms of mail clients

Only in terms of storage and 'hive mind' spam detection. The UI was pretty shitty, and not much better than Hotmail.

>The UI was pretty shitty, and not much better than Hotmail.

UI performance was great due to early use of ajax. If you had bad connection, which was extremely common in 2000's, then it worked way better than any alternative.

Of course, now it's the other way around, static websites are fast and SPAs can be dogshit slow.

That’s like saying the automobile was only ahead in terms of propulsion, the UI was pretty shitty and not much better than a horse.

Uh, I still use the no-javascript interface in my personal gmail.

it's immensely fast when compared to modern crapware-gmail.

and btw I remember hotmail too... the nicest thing was that you didn't have to refresh the whole page, e-mails just appeared (ajax probably).

and the conversation view, that was really innovative. i mean, mail clients had been doing threading for like forever, but wemail mostly didn't.

Webmail still doesn't.

It does 'grouping' at maximum. Try reading a mailinglist in the gmail webinterface. A reply on a reply should be indented one level, not being shown at the same level as the mail it replies to.

Did you use hotmail? It was absolutely awful.

A gigabyte mailbox space was revolutionary when many competitors only gave 20 megabytes for free (and you could pay and upgrade to 150 megabytes or so).

That was an example where a simple change in a number turned into a qualitatively different service.

IIRC Hotmail was only 2MB at the time of announcement.

Spam blocking was on another level, I've managed setups with e.g. Spamassassin (?) back then and Gmail was something else.

Reading email within a usable UI where you didn't have to download the spam first before it could be sorted was a pretty fucking big deal.

It's still my preferred method of dealing with email to this day. I never want to deal with POP/SMTP local client email ever again.

The storage, the spam filtering, the interface were massive improvements over the status quo of the day.