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Palm Pixi Needs a Dusting of Speed

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:52:55 +0000

Since the debut of the Palm Pre in June, Palm has talked about the value of the device’s webOS operating system, which offers fast responsiveness, multitasking, universal search and smart synchronization. These features are accessed using delightful multitouch gestures like swiping with a fingertip. So it makes perfect sense that Palm would want to expand its family of products running this great mobile operating system.

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This week, Palm (PALM) introduced a second device with webOS: the Palm Pixi (palm.com/pixi). This is a stripped-down version of the Pre and it costs $100 (after a $50 instant rebate and a $100 mail-in rebate and with a two-year service contract) compared with the $150 Pre. Walmart.com is currently selling the Pixi for even less—$50 (http://3.ly/oSE). Both the Pixi and the Pre run on Sprint’s (S) network.

I’ve been testing the Pixi and I’ve found that the physical differences from the Pre are acceptable variations that most people won’t mind and may not even detect. These include a smaller, lower-resolution screen, a two-megapixel camera rather than the Pre’s three-megapixel camera and stationary keyboard instead of one that slides out. The Pixi isn’t as pebble-shaped as the Pre, but its back cover is rounded to fit comfortably in a hand. And like the Pre, it has an eight-gigabyte storage capacity and it’s thin and light enough to forget in a jeans pocket or to comfortably hold up to your ear during phone calls.

The Pixi’s internal changes are much tougher to accept. It lacks Wi-Fi capability and so must rely solely on Sprint’s 3G network for its connection, which I found to be frustratingly slow at times. This littler phone also runs on a weaker processor than the Pre, a decision that Palm says helped cut costs and make the Pixi small. But this processor’s speed is slow enough to notice immediately and it robs webOS of its lightning-fast speed. The Pixi’s progress indicator—a spinning, white circle—appeared on my screen too often.

The $100 Palm Pixi is like a mini version of the Pre. A $70 Touchstone accessory (right) magnetically holds the Pixi as it charges.

Like its super-smartphone competitors, including Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) newer BlackBerrys and Google’s (GOOG) Android phones, the Palm Pixi taps into a virtual store from which users can download apps for the device. But Palm’s App Catalog currently holds fewer than 400 apps and roughly 80 of those aren’t yet configured for the Pixi. This means that people who buy the $100 Pixi can choose from just around 300 apps for download, compared with the 100,000 apps available for Apple’s $100 iPhone 3G.

Some apps come preloaded on the Pixi, like Facebook and NFL Mobile Live. I downloaded others, including Pandora radio, Tweed for Twitter and a game called Word Whirl Lite. I logged into my Pandora account and played songs from one of my personalized radio stations while reading through email. A tiny “P” icon at the bottom of the Pixi’s screen notified me that Pandora was running. Other notifiers, like new emails or instant messages, appear at the bottom as well.

If you aren’t familiar with webOS, it’s easy to learn. Functions are designed to be more people-centric rather than program-centric. For example, I can look at a name in Contacts and see how I’m linked to that person—like through Facebook or Google Talk. If I want to start an instant-messaging conversation with that person, I can do so right there rather than opening AIM or Google Talk first to find a person’s name and then initiate conversation. I logged onto the Pixi with a Google account and the device was smart enough to also synchronize data from my Google Talk, Google Calendar and Gmail contacts.

The Card View, a display of all the programs that are simultaneously running at any given time, can be exposed with a simple, upward finger swipe starting below the screen. To close a program, simply touch it with a finger and toss it upward, as if throwing it away. This is one of the most satisfying gestures in webOS. And it’s a good thing, too, because Pixi users will need to use it more often than they did with the Pre. Palm suggests running only seven programs at once for the best performance, rather than the 10 you can leave opened on the Pre.

But my Pixi stuttered with just five programs—sometimes fewer—opened. Simple tasks like opening an email or searching for an app in the App Catalog were painfully slow. I received an email containing one digital photo, and the process of opening just the email—not even the photo—took about 10 seconds. When I finally opened the email and its photo, I saved it to my Pixi and tapped on a menu option to upload it to Facebook. But five minutes later, the spinning progress indicator was still on my Pixi’s screen and I gave up. I tried again and the same thing happened. Finally, on the third try, my photo posted to Facebook.

As was the case for the Palm Pre, the Pixi can be charged by plugging into a normal AC adaptor or by resting it on the Touchstone, a $70 accessory that, with the help of a special back cover that snaps onto the Pixi, magnetically holds this device as it charges. A handful of stylish “Artist Series” back covers will sell on Palm.com for $50 each and will ship in early December.

The Pixi’s 2.6-inch screen has a 320×400 resolution, which is a step down from the Pre’s 3.1-inch, 320×480-resolution screen. Palm estimates the Pixi’s battery lasts for five hours of talk time, the same as the Pre, but for 350 hours of standby time—or 50 more hours than the Pre.

The Palm Pixi’s keyboard is tiny but sufficient. People who are used to BlackBerry or even iPhone keyboards might be irked that the Pixi keyboard doesn’t have built-in shortcuts like holding down a key to capitalize it or pressing the space bar twice to add a period to the end of a sentence.

Like its predecessor, the Pixi has a designated Gesture Area just beneath its screen where users can swipe a fingertip for quickly navigating through screens, like swiping right-to-left to go back a screen. Unlike the Pre, the Pixi doesn’t have a silver button below its screen that immediately takes users to Card View, but I didn’t miss this button.

Though the Palm Pixi is $50 less than the Palm Pre, its downgraded performance doesn’t make that dollar savings worth it.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

How to Tweak Outlook Email To Work for You

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:26:03 +0000

If you have a job, chances are you use Microsoft Outlook.

But are you using it to your best advantage?

Despite the popularity of Microsoft Outlook, several of its functions aren’t noticeable unless you dig around in menus or try out keystroke shortcuts. Many of these tricks can be found by reading a user manual, but users would rather be spending their time in Outlook responding to or writing emails.

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In last week’s column I reviewed a program called Postbox, which displays email and its contents in unique ways. In that review I mentioned that Outlook, too, has extra functions, but that these aren’t always as obvious as they should be. Below, I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be some of Outlook’s lesser-known talents. I focused on Outlook 2007, which many people currently use, and I also included a handful of notes about what Outlook 2010—due out late spring or early summer—will include. With any luck, you’ll find a few tips here that make your time in Outlook better spent.

Search Me

Rather than simply entering a word into the Outlook search box, you can help the search engine narrow its results by giving it specific parameters. For example, if I remember that my friend sent an email with “LSU tickets” in the subject line, I can type “subject: LSU” to pull out all emails about the Louisiana university. Or if I want to find all emails from Molly, I can write, “from: Molly.” This works with several other terms including “to,” “sent,” “cc” and “message size.”

Search Folders, shown in the folder list with a magnifying glass icon beside them, offer a way of saving the searches you perform most often. If, for example, you often search for flight confirmation emails, you could make a Search Folder called “Travel” that would contain a constantly updated list of emails containing the names of airlines.

New folders can be set up by right clicking on the Search Folders icon, selecting New Search Folder and following steps to select a type of folder from one of many pre-set types of folders—such as “mail sent directly to me,” “large mail” or “mail flagged for follow up.” Or you can create a custom Search Folder by telling it to search for certain words that appear within specific message fields.

Color Coding

To make certain emails stand out in a large list—like emails from your boss or messages addressed only to you—you can set up a rule that makes the email show up in a specific color. Or you can set certain emails to appear in bold font, or in a specific font type and size. Just think of all the emails from your mom that will never go unnoticed again thanks to red type, 14-point font and underlined text.

Setting up the way emails are displayed can be done by going to the Tools menu, selecting Organize, Using Colors and then choosing specific colors for emails from specific people. More advanced automatic settings for applying font type and size to emails can be added by selecting Automatic Formatting in the top right corner of the Using Colors screen. Click “Add” to create more rules.

Souped-Up Calendar

The Outlook Calendar can be organized to look the way you want it rather than the way it’s set up by default. For example, if you like looking at your day in hourly intervals rather than Outlook’s default 30-minute blocks, you can right click anywhere you see hours shown and select 60 minutes. Other increments are also available, like five, 10 and 15 minutes.

Outlook can also display other time zones right beside your own time zone by right clicking on the listed meeting hours, selecting Change Time Zone and checking the box labeled Show an Additional Time Zone. This is helpful for people who often work with distant colleagues, saving them from making a mistake and not factoring the right time zone for the other person. A Swap Time Zone button here quickly changes from one set zone to another, which could be a boon for people who regularly travel to different places and want their Outlook settings to reflect that they’re working from there.

Like color-coded emails, calendar events can be automatically sorted into pre-set categories like Personal, Travel and Family by setting formatting to look for certain words like Tennis (Personal), United (Travel) and Mom, Dad or Allison (Family). Added events that use these words automatically get labeled with a designated color to give your calendar a visual way of distinguishing different types of activities.

Another useful calendar tip: You can hold Control while selecting certain dates on the small view of the calendar and you’ll see only the schedules for those dates. So if I want to see Sept. 19, 22 and 24, I hold Control while selecting each date to see the three days’ activities displayed in the right viewing panel.

Visual Contacts

All Contacts in Outlook can be labeled with a photo of the person, which you add by double clicking on the small head icon in someone’s contact card and then choosing a photo from your collection. People who work in the same company and use Outlook can add their own photo to their contact and it will show up with their emails.

The top right corner of each contact card shows what a person’s digital business card would look like; this is an image that can be edited and copied using a right click, and then it can be copied and pasted to any email signature.

Looking Ahead

In Outlook 2010, due out next year, Microsoft (MSFT) says it hopes to streamline work in Outlook, creating smarter rules that do more with less manual work.

One example of this approach is that emails in the next version of Outlook will be, by default, sorted into conversations—a little like Gmail’s current system. An Ignore button will move all future emails related to the same conversation into the Deleted Items folder. That will include those with changed subject lines because Microsoft uses a special identifier to know which emails are associated with one another. A Clean Up button moves all redundant replies to the Deleted Items folder, leaving just the most recent message in the conversation.

Another feature is Reply with Meeting, a button in Outlook 2010 that will let users create a meeting out of an email. Selecting Reply with Meeting automatically invites those included in the email to attend a meeting.

The title of the meeting is the same as the subject of the email. If the users are in the same corporate network and they all use Outlook Calendar, this tool also looks for the next available time and date on everyone’s calendar.

Quick Steps, another streamlined feature of Outlook 2010, are one-click shortcuts that simultaneously perform several common actions that people take when handling email. If you select a Quick Step called Reply and Delete, it replies to an email and deletes the original. Users can create their own personalized Quick Steps like one labeled Social that, when selected, marks the email as read, moves it to a special folder and labels it under a certain category.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to
Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

A Program That Makes Your Inbox Less Scary

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:02:03 +0000

For many people, email is the main way they communicate with friends, co-workers and family members. It contains bills, class assignments, trip itineraries, photos and love notes. But as much as it gets used every day, the software that we utilize to read and sort our email isn’t as clever or time-saving as it could be.

This week I tested Postbox 1.0, a program designed to handle your email in a smart, helpful manner. Starting Wednesday, this program is available at www.Postbox-Inc.com. Postbox sorts through your email and detects its contents so you can see Web links, photos, contacts and other items themselves with one button click—whether Microsoft Word (MSFT) documents, PDFs or spreadsheets—without digging through messages. Since its inbox is constantly being indexed, all search queries return near-instant results.

Postbox uses an Inspector Pane on the right side of each email to extract and display elements like images, attachments and contact information.

Postbox’s founders come from Mozilla Corp., maker of the popular Firefox browser, so Postbox is based on Mozilla technology and its security standards. Email is indexed locally on your computer, so none of it is sent back across the Web to Postbox. It uses Content Tabs (tabs are another feature borrowed from Firefox) to help visually organize folders, messages and content extracted from those messages. It displays the most important elements of each message in a right-side panel. Received emails can even be edited so they aren’t sitting in your inbox with subject lines like, “Fw: Re: Re: Sept.” Instead, you can rewrite the subject to something like “Flight times.”

But this program isn’t free like Gmail, Hotmail or other Web-based email programs, nor does it come preloaded on a computer the way Apple Mail (AAPL) is on every Mac. Users can try Postbox for a free 30-day trial period after which each license costs $40, allowing one person to use their license on multiple computers (i.e. at work, at home, on a laptop). For another $20, a Family Pack option will give up to five family members use of Postbox. An additional $25 buys a Lifetime Upgrades plan that entitles you to receive free of charge any major version of Postbox that’s released; other nonmajor releases are free upgrades.

I used Postbox on a Mac and a Windows Vista computer, filling it up with thousands of emails from Gmail, Hotmail and .Mac accounts. It didn’t run properly on my company-issued computer, which is plugged into a network firewall. Postbox says it supports open protocols like IMPAP, POP and SMTP, and that it would work with Microsoft Exchange if Exchange were set to use those open protocols.

For all of Postbox’s terrific features, it can be hard to suddenly see your email in a different way since most of our email programs haven’t changed much in years. Outlook, for example, has plenty of hidden features that many people never learn how to use. Postbox seems to know how slow users are to adapt to change and so it reveals many of its features whenever it gets the chance.

For example, Postbox pops up an alert that shows you how to connect this email program to Facebook and Twitter so that you can post status updates or tweets without leaving your email. These connections also let Postbox try to pull one representative photo for each of your email contacts by matching a name in an email with someone’s Facebook or Twitter name—if you follow the person. It also uses photos assigned to contacts in the Mac OS X address book, which is used by Apple Mail.

Or take a feature in Postbox called Topics. This is a way of auto-organizing messages into different groups after you label them as being part of a certain topic, say “Mom’s Birthday.” All messages in an email conversation are grouped into “Mom’s Birthday,” as are any future responses to the same conversation. Postbox gives you three ways to label an email conversation as being part of a certain topic: from the toolbar, using a Topics button in the message header or by pressing “T” from within a message. You can also select a topic as you’re composing an email, pre-sorting that conversation into a designated topic.

Not everyone will like Topics because, however helpful the feature is, it makes the user do more work when he or she just want to get through a huge pile of unread emails. Labeling each email with a certain topic doesn’t take long, but it’s still an extra step. I would like Postbox to create automatic topics for sorting emails. For example, I recently sent and received at least 50 emails related to rescheduling tennis matches. Even though all the messages had the word “tennis” in them, not all of them were related to the same email, so they wouldn’t sort into the topic I created, “Tennis Make-Up.” Postbox says it has considered automatic options like these and may try to incorporate something similar in future versions of the product.

If my 30-day trial ran out tomorrow, I’d miss Postbox’s Inspector Bar the most. This feature works like a filter, instantly sucking out the most important parts in each email—including messages, attachments, images or links—and displaying them in a blue, right-side panel.

Another useful tool in Postbox is the Compose Sidebar. This also appears as a right-side panel but it shows up when someone is writing an email. This panel can display attachments, images, links or contacts found in all emails so you can simply drag and drop that item into your email as you’re composing it. This took me a while to get comfortable using because I’m so used to hunting through emails for things that I need to find. But once it became a habit, I found myself using the Compose Sidebar often.

If you have Postbox running in the background and you get an email, small notifications appear in the bottom left of your screen telling you which email account received the message and who sent it.

In the Content Tabs, which fill up with all attachments, images, links or contacts found in your indexed email, a feature called the Action Bar lets you save, send, or instantly glance at a document. This saves you from opening each email and its attachment, a process that sometimes requires opening a slow-to-open program to see the document. A slider in this Action Bar lets you adjust the size of images from small to large.

Postbox shines a unique light on email and the way we work with it every day. Not all of its features will come naturally for long-time users of the same email program. But for someone who wants a fast search option built into email, Postbox is a winner.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Yahoo Renovates Its Home Page

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:52:02 +0000

Makeovers are always fun to watch. Someone swoops in on an unsuspecting fashion “don’t,” improves him or her with a new hairstyle, makeup and wardrobe, and presents the finished product to overjoyed friends and family.

Last week, Yahoo (YHOO) unveiled the results of its latest makeover: the revamped home page. Carol Bartz, the company’s relatively new CEO, has said that Yahoo’s home page needed just such a makeover. After not changing significantly since 2006, the home page fits the role of a fashion don’t. And consumers, like family and friend observing the aftermath of a makeover, will either be overjoyed or nonplussed by the finished product.

Yahoo’s cleaner, streamlined home page emphasizes its ability to view content from other Web sites.

I’ve been using this new home page for over a week now and I can report that Yahoo followed one of the most important makeover rules by doing more with less. Gone is the busy screen saturated with advertisements and clutter. The new home page is clean and easier to absorb.

Favorite ‘Apps’

Yahoo’s home-page makeover goes beyond surface improvements. Its most useful feature is a list called My Favorites, which contains a variety of Web sites from within and outside of Yahoo. When your cursor hovers over one of these entries, which Yahoo calls “apps,” a pane opens with a preview of content from that site. This turns your Yahoo home page into an aggregator of information, bringing glimpses of information to you in one place so you don’t have to waste time navigating to other sites.

But if a greater number of these apps were more robust, you would be able to do more right within the hover pane, like watch videos or play a game. Currently, the hover preview pane only lets you see content, update social-network statuses and enter search terms, the results of which are shown on a new Web page.

[ See post to watch video ]

This makeover comes at an interesting time in the world of online news aggregation. Competitors like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) incorporate data from all over the Web into iGoogle.com and MSN.com, respectively. And the concept of the home page as a starting point isn’t as popular as it once was: Many people now start browsing the Web by first clicking on a link in an email or in one of many social-networking sites, like Twitter.

Traffic Driver

Of course, Yahoo plans to use this redesigned home page to drive traffic to the company’s own sites like Shine, Answers, Health and OMG (a celebrity gossip site). These Yahoo sites make up half of the 65 apps designed especially for My Favorites. Yahoo says that its apps for other sites, including WSJ.com, were made by Yahoo and the outside company running the Web site. An ad runs on the hover preview page of each app and the revenue for this ad goes to Yahoo, not the content provider.

Yahoo will use your list of My Favorites apps to learn about what sites you use so as to target ads at users. This proved true for most of the ads I saw on my home page, but strangely, the AllThingsD.com app displayed ads for Mars chocolate and Del Monte fruit snacks rather than technology products.

Module Thinking

My Favorites is fixed on the far left of the Yahoo home page and a large search box sits prominently at the top of the home screen.

The top middle section of the screen shows a carousel of images and current news that Yahoo calls the Today Module; below this is the News Module, which houses tabs labeled News, World, Local, and Finance. The Local and Finance tabs can be customized by entering a ZIP Code and stock tickers, respectively. The Today and News Modules can switch positions if you click on a small arrow.

The revamped home page will serve as a starting point for the Yahoo Application Platform, or YAP. Sometime around late September, Yahoo will open its YAP (no pun intended) to software developers so they can make all kinds of apps with a variety of functions for the home page, not just apps that are tied to Web sites.

You can customize the home page for style or content changes if you sign on using a user ID and password. Changes should appear the next time you log in. But this didn’t work as well as it should. I set my page to display in a tangerine color, one of six colors offered for customizing the page, but the home page wasn’t tangerine-colored the next time I logged in.

Some Problems

I had trouble logging into my Gmail account using a special Gmail app, but this and the color problem were fixed by the time this column went to press.

Some apps didn’t work at all, like the Facebook app, which couldn’t connect to my Facebook account. Yahoo said the problem should be fixed this week.

The home page seemed to have a longer memory when it came to the list of My Favorites. I edited my list, adding more pre-made apps and creating some of my own using a built-in tool that lets you enter a Web site. Yahoo has preloaded icons for some popular Web sites such as cnn.com; otherwise, it will use a generic star.

Permanent Apps

Two apps are permanent fixtures at the top of the My Favorites list: One shows a list of all Yahoo sites and the other shows Yahoo Mail. Everything else can be deleted, added and moved around in the list. One of my favorite apps was for Epicurious.com, the food and recipe site. When I hovered over the Epicurious app, images of food with recipe names appeared in the hover preview pane. One click on an image sent me to the Web site for the full version of the recipe.

After adding many of my own apps to My Favorites, I wished Yahoo had a one-click tool for converting my browser bookmarks into apps. Yahoo says this is something it hopes to introduce in the future.

Mobile Rollout

This week, Yahoo started rolling out a mobile Web site made to run on the iPhone’s Safari browser that coordinates with the more robust version of the home page. I used this Yahoo home page on the iPhone and liked that it immediately pulled up the My Favorites list I had carefully constructed on my computer. Similar offerings will soon be available for other mobile devices.

The new Yahoo home page is a refreshing way of bringing content to you rather than you chasing around the Web looking for it. The My Favorites apps need a little more power to be truly useful and to encourage people to use the Yahoo home page every day, but Yahoo hopes to solve some of that problem in a couple of months when it opens the site to developers.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Skipping Your Computer's Warm-Up Time

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:10:03 +0000

The time it takes to boot up a computer can be a source of frustration — especially if you’re in a rush and just want to log on, get information and move on with your day. If televisions took as long as PCs take to start working, we’d miss game-winning touchdowns. Slow boot-up times are especially common with the Windows Vista operating system.

One way to evade slow boot-up syndrome is to use a special operating environment that performs a handful of basic tasks and works as an alternative to Windows. If installed on your computer, a system like this can start up instantly when you press your PC’s power button — like turning on a TV.

[ See post to watch video ]

Phoenix Technologies Ltd. (PTEC) and DeviceVM Inc. both offer popular quick-start environments. Phoenix offers two solutions, called HyperSpace Dual and HyperSpace Hybrid, for five PC manufacturers, including Lenovo, Toshiba and Acer. DeviceVM’s product, called Splashtop, comes preloaded on PCs from Asus, VooDooPC and Lenovo, and each brand calls this feature something different, like “Quick Start” on a Lenovo laptop. I used HyperSpace Hybrid on a Lenovo ThinkPad X301, but didn’t get a chance to try Splashtop.

Closed Windows

It’s misleading to say that the Phoenix HyperSpace products offer a faster way to start up your computer, because they don’t actually open Windows, which is your computer’s heart and soul. Instead, they offer a primitive, bare-bones user interface that relies on Web-based applications. For example, you can send and receive email, but only by using a Web-based email program like Gmail or Hotmail. Documents must be created using a program like Google Docs, and when you watch videos, you must use a player like YouTube rather than something like Windows Media Player or QuickTime. Photos can be viewed either via a photo Web site like Flickr or in the HyperSpace browser. Nothing like Word or PowerPoint is available in this slimmed-down environment.

HyperSpace Dual, which costs $40 a year or $100 for three years, operates only one environment or the other (Windows or HyperSpace) at a time and must shut one system down to start the other. HyperSpace Hybrid costs $60 annually or $150 for three years and can run both Windows and HyperSpace side by side. Hybrid users can easily toggle back and forth between systems by pressing the F4 key. If your PC meets the required specifications, you can download a 21-day free trial of HyperSpace Dual or Hybrid from HyperSpace.com.

(DeviceVM’s Splashtop doesn’t run side-by-side with Windows, so is more comparable to HyperSpace Dual. But it does have features that are currently missing in both versions of HyperSpace, including a music player, photo manager, Skype and an instant-messaging program that works with popular IM services.)

Though Windows exists on the same machine, its contents aren’t capable of synchronizing with the Phoenix quick-start system. So if I wrote and saved a draft of this column in Windows, and opened HyperSpace on my laptop a few days later, I wouldn’t be able to see my column or any other files on the Windows side. And browser bookmarks don’t synchronize with the HyperSpace browser.

In HyperSpace Hybrid, you can download files from the Web, like photos from Flickr, and save them to a My Documents folder. Confusingly, this has nothing to do with the My Documents folder on the Windows side, and Windows can’t view those files. But anything I download to HyperSpace Hybrid (not HyperSpace Dual) can be transferred to and opened in Windows by clicking an option that says “Open in Windows.” This is essentially using Windows as a viewer.

Using Less Power

In addition to zippy start times, Phoenix claims that its quick-start environment doesn’t use as much power as a full operating system like Windows. According to the company, both versions of HyperSpace are capable of improving a machine’s battery life by up to 30% because while HyperSpace is working, Windows is automatically set into sleep mode, fewer things are happening in HyperSpace compared with Windows, and the processor is operating at a lower speed.

Before I could download HyperSpace, I had to make some adjustments to the laptop’s internal startup system, or BIOS, which I did without much trouble by following some clear directions from HyperSpace’s Web page. I also had to change my hard-disk partition to allow for more room so that HyperSpace would fit. When I finally installed HyperSpace Hybrid, its wireless Internet didn’t work at all, and it also shut down the wireless capability on the Windows Vista side of my machine. Phoenix Technologies said these were special circumstances related to my laptop, and that not everyone would have the same experience I did.

Links to Web Apps

The HyperSpace environment has a left-side panel filled with icons that link to Web-based applications like Facebook, Flickr, Amazon (AMZN) and Gmail. It seems odd that a subscription program comes loaded with what could be seen as advertisements. What’s more, none of these widgets can be removed or repositioned in the panel. And users can’t add their own icons linking to Web sites that they like.

In March, the company says an updated version of HyperSpace will be able to synchronize some information between Windows and HyperSpace, like Internet Explorer favorites, and it will include built-in players for DVDs and music, as well as games like Sudoku. The new version also will let people plug a digital camera into their HyperSpace Hybrid PC to view and save photos; now, USB ports are turned off in Hybrid to save battery life, disallowing digital-photo uploads.

If you dread the time-sucking process of booting up your PC just to do a quick Internet search, you might want to try downloading HyperSpace. But the confusing installation process might persuade average computer users to get a laptop with a pre-installed quick-start program or suffer with slow boot times.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

New BlackBerry Offers Versatility in Flip Form

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:18:02 +0000

Smartphones are masters of multitasking. They email, browse the Web, instant message, take pictures, run applications or play videos and music. So it’s easy to forget how uncomfortable they are to use as phones. Most are rectangular slabs that are awkward to hold against the ear, causing many smartphone users to also carry a basic cellphone just for calls.

At least one smartphone manufacturer is doing something about this. This week, Research In Motion (RIMM) introduced the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220, available for $150 with a two-year contract from T-Mobile (DT). This device is the first BlackBerry in a flip phone, or clamshell, form. Like RIM’s mainstream, candy-bar-shaped BlackBerry Pearl, the Flip uses a SureType keyboard, which has condensed keys and relies on predictive text software.

The Pearl Flip uses a SureType keyboard, which takes up less space.

After using the Pearl Flip for a week, I’ve found it to be a stylish messaging device that works well as a comfortable phone. I really liked its exterior screen, which is designed to show previews of incoming messages, saving people the trouble of flipping open the device. It runs on T-Mobile’s slow EDGE network, but has built-in Wi-Fi and the ability to automatically connect to saved, nearby wireless networks.

First-time smartphone buyers will likely find the Pearl Flip to be a good fit. When it flips open, a special hinge drops the top half of the device slightly behind the bottom half, and a handy trackball makes navigation easy. The Flip’s Web browser enables streaming videos that look sharp on its interior screen, and a microSD card slot supports up to 16 gigabytes of memory.

But current BlackBerry owners who want to switch to a device with a more comfortable phone may have trouble adjusting to the Pearl Flip’s SureType keyboard — especially if they’re used to a device with a full QWERTY keyboard. Though the Pearl Flip’s keyboard is a generous size and its keys are flat and easy to press, its SureType design assigns two letters to almost every key, which can be frustrating to use when predictive text guesses a different word than that which is intended.

The Pearl Flip 8220 is RIM’s first flip phone BlackBerry.

The Pearl Flip supports T-Mobile’s Unlimited HotSpot Calling, a service that doesn’t use any minutes on phone calls begun in Wi-Fi zones. Even if a user leaves the Wi-Fi zone in which he or she started a phone conversation, the call passes over to the T-Mobile cellular network without dropping out. This service costs $10 monthly in addition to regular service charges.

When I made calls on the Pearl Flip, friends on the other line noted how crisp and clear our connection sounded. And best of all, the Pearl Flip’s long, clamshell profile was easy to hold and fit snugly and comfortably between my ear and shoulder when I needed two hands to carry things.

BlackBerry’s signature red light blinks in this device’s top corner to indicate new messages. The 1.6-inch exterior screen displays about 25 words (give or take) from newly received emails, instant messages, SMS, MMS, calendar notifications and task reminders. If a message is received from a contact to whom a photo is assigned, that photo also shows up on the external screen to identify the sender. Side buttons let users scroll up or down through these previews.

This display is designed so that the same message being previewed externally will appear on the internal screen as soon as the Pearl Flip is opened. This makes sense because people will want to reply to some emails or read their entire contents after seeing a short preview. But my device didn’t do this at first; instead, the internal screen seemed completely unrelated to the external screen. I finally got this feature to work after my external screen froze and I rebooted the Pearl Flip. RIM said it hadn’t seen this behavior before, and wasn’t sure what had caused it.

The interior screen measures 2.4 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 240×320 pixels, which is a larger, higher resolution screen than most basic cellphones. While using Wi-Fi, I pulled up YouTube.com and watched a video. It played without skipping or stopping while streaming directly from the Web. A higher-resolution video, which was saved to my device, automatically played in horizontal mode so as to take up the entire screen; YouTube videos play vertically, without using the full screen.

Up to 10 email accounts can be set up on the Pearl Flip; I had no problems using Hotmail, .Mac and Gmail accounts. I also signed into AOL Instant Messenger and Google Talk on the Pearl Flip. Along with these messaging programs, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and BlackBerry Messenger also come pre-installed and ready to use.

If my Pearl Flip was closed and I remained signed into an instant-messaging client, notifications appeared on the external screen telling me who was sending an IM and what it said. When I opened the device, I was automatically directed to the screen where I could reply to the instant message.

I tested the T-Mobile Unlimited HotSpot Calling feature by starting calls using a Wi-Fi network and then leaving the network’s range. The calls remained steady without dropping or fading, and if I were a paying customer, I wouldn’t have been charged minutes for those calls. Calls that start out of Wi-Fi zones and end in Wi-Fi zones do deduct minutes. My Pearl Flip had no trouble automatically moving from the cellular network to a Wi-Fi network.

All T-Mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, such as at airports or in Starbucks (SBUX), automatically work with the Pearl Flip if you’re registered for the $10 monthly Unlimited Hotspot Calling.

If you’re considering taking the plunge into the always-connected world of smartphones, or if you want a more comfortable phone in your smartphone and don’t mind the quirks of SureType, the Pearl Flip 8220 may be the BlackBerry for you.

– Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Getting Mobile Novices to Check Email

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:00:02 +0000

Are you a member of the “I-check-my-email-constantly-even-when-I-know-no-one-has-emailed-me” club? If so, your mobile email device is never far and you’ve found yourself wondering how other people can leave unread emails sitting in their inboxes all day. On the other hand, those seemingly unplugged people are likely puzzled by BlackBerry addicts, wondering what could possibly be so urgent that they need to know about it the second it happens.

This week, I tested Peek, a device that might bridge the gap between these two camps. It’s made for those who don’t intend to become consumed with mobile email, and don’t need a combination phone, Internet, digital camera and email gadget. Yet from time to time, these people wish they had a better way to check emails without going home and turning on their computers.

The $100 Peek (GetPeek.com) sends and receives emails for $20 a month.

Since I fit the constantly-checking-email description, I enlisted the help of someone who falls squarely into the category that Peek is targeting: my mother. Mom is constantly on the go, working on one project or another, and she doesn’t have time to consistently check her email. On more than one occasion, I’ve had to call her to talk about emails I sent that she didn’t yet read.

Stylish and Simple

Peek is a stylishly thin device that, to a mobile email novice, could pass for a BlackBerry. It receives and sends email, period. Peek doesn’t have a Web browser, phone or built-in digital camera. It’s sold for $100 at Target and GetPeek.com, and costs $20 monthly for contract-free service. Most email accounts work with this gadget, including Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and AOL, and up to three accounts can be set to work on each device.

Peek Inc., a New York company that was started by former Virgin Mobile USA (VM) employees, mailed a Peek to my mom in Pennsylvania, and she has been using it for about a week with positive results.

I, too, tested a Peek, but I was more interested in my mom’s feedback since, prior to this test, she hadn’t used a mobile email device and I use two different ones — regularly. Overall, I’d suggest waiting until November to buy a Peek due to a handful of improvements that the company plans to add by then.

Winning Over a Novice

My mom got the hang of Peek almost instantly and found it both helpful and relatively easy to use. She liked its full keyboard and the way most of its keys lit up and were familiarly placed like those on a computer keyboard — a feature I take for granted on my BlackBerry. Its price and stylish, thin look appealed to her, too. She tested an Aqua Blue Peek — though the device also comes in Black Cherry and Charcoal Gray. I knew Mom was catching on when she casually sent a message from her Peek late one night using the subject line, “What’s Up?”

My mom suggested a few improvements, and I agreed with all of them. The Peek can vibrate, chime and glow blue when new emails are received, but none of these indicators are particularly noticeable. For example, the chime sounds only once and neither my mom nor I could always hear it — even at its loudest setting — especially if it was in a purse. A blue indicator light on the Peek glows once every 10 seconds for 10 minutes after an email is received, but goes idle after that.

The font used on the Peek’s screen could stand to be a little bigger. My mom found words typed in all capital letters were easier and faster to read than the regular font, but she thought most people wouldn’t have too much trouble while using their glasses.

Peek Inc. says that by November, it will have added a louder chime, a constantly blinking indicator light and a larger font to the device. Also in November, people who purchase 12 months of service at once will get an extra month free.

Compared with my BlackBerry Curve, the Peek was thinner but I found its buttons and side scroll wheel a bit stiff. And Mom and I both found that the oft-used Space bar key was too tough to press down.

One Inbox, Three Accounts

The Peek’s straightforward system uses one inbox view (in which up to three email accounts are combined), one menu and a side scroll wheel for selecting commands. And though my mom didn’t seem to mind, the device’s overall navigation system came off as a bit clumsy to me. For example, rather than selecting an email to read it, I had to select an email, and then choose “Open Email” from a menu list. On most other devices, this can be done with one step.

But some BlackBerry tricks are built into the Peek, such as touching “T” to automatically go to the top of an email or inbox; “B” to go to the bottom; or “N” to move to the next email without navigating back to the inbox list. Likewise, the space bar serves as a built-in Page Down button. And holding a letter down will capitalize it.

Photo attachments can be easily opened on the Peek, though attached documents from programs like Word and Excel won’t open up.

Synching Contacts

A simple step lets users synchronize their email account’s contact list with the Peek. My mom did this with an AOL account, and I did it with Hotmail, Gmail and .Mac accounts. Peek devices automatically check for email every two to five minutes, or if users can’t wait two minutes, they can initiate a Send/Receive manually and see an up-to-date queue of emails.

Peeks each have eight megabytes of usable memory, which can hold about 5,000 emails. Once a device reaches capacity, an on-screen prompt asks permission to delete the 500 oldest emails. Peek Inc. says a full battery charge will last about five days if a device handles around 10 to 15 emails a day; power users who send and receive 200 to 300 emails a day will get about two days of use from a full charge.

When asked, my mom concluded that she would probably buy a Peek, but said she still wasn’t sure that she had an urgent need to see email all that often. She also noted that Peek could become a Pandora’s box of sorts for people who, as they use it more often, might want to get more out of it — such as Google searches or other Web browsing.

Peek serves a purpose: It gives those who don’t belong to the “I-check-my-email-constantly” club a way to “peek” in on their emails and not feel so unplugged from friends and family. That alone, is reason enough to buy my mom one of these devices.

– Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

A New Picasa Puts a Name To All Those Faces

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:00:02 +0000

Posting digital photos online to share with friends and family is supposed to be fun. You finally get to show your shots off to the people who waited weeks or even months to see them, and glancing through the images can conjure up memorable anecdotes. But wouldn’t it be even more enjoyable to look at pictures with the people in them identified so you can quickly find those shots with certain people you want to see?

People rarely tag photos because identifying and labeling the people in them is an arduous, manual procedure. This week, I tested the new version of Google’s free photo organizing and editing software, Picasa 3 ( picasa.com) and an updated version of its free online-sharing component, Picasa Web Albums. The Web component tries to take some of the work out of identifying people in your shared photos using facial recognition. It automatically isolates faces in your pictures, invites you to identify them by name, and then recognizes these faces every time they pop up in future pictures so they can be tagged with one click and no typing.

New and Improved

Picasa 3, the Windows desktop application, includes a handful of new or improved features, including smarter editing tools, like cropping suggestions, and a one-step process to share photos from desktop albums. It also has the ability to create movies from still photos; to edit video clips and to upload those movies to YouTube. Personalized photo collages are a snap to make, and pictures can be labeled with text right on the image.

But my favorite feature, the ability to name-tag faces in photos, is found in Picasa Web Albums.

When photos are uploaded from a personal computer to Picasa Web Albums and a user enables Name Tags, facial recognition finds all of the photos containing faces and then groups together the photos it thinks are of the same person. The user must create name labels to go with each face. Once a face is labeled, the program does a pretty good job of recognizing that face in subsequent photos and suggesting a name to go with it. These labels can be seen by you or others, if you enable visible name tags when sharing.

In Sync

Another plus in Picasa 3 and Picasa Web Albums is that both now clearly label all albums to show which are public or private, and which are set to automatically synchronize with the Web-based versions of these albums. And these two programs are smart enough to synchronize with one another using a single mouse-click. Picasa Web Albums worked so smoothly that I often forgot it was Web-based and not a desktop application. But all photo editing and retouching must be done on Picasa 3, the desktop program. This led to many moments when I became absorbed in Picasa Web Albums and looked there for editing tools before remembering I needed to return to Picasa 3 to touch up photos.

Likewise, name tagging can only be done on Picasa Web Albums because photos must be uploaded and scanned for facial recognition to work. I found myself offline in the Picasa software, noticing a photo with a face that wasn’t name tagged and wanting to label it, but not being able to do so without using Picasa Web Albums.

Some Back and Forth

I eventually got used to this back and forth between Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, but it could be a deterrent for some users. Google (GOOG) says it is looking into how to integrate name tags with its Picasa 3 desktop software. As for making a Mac-compatible version of Picasa 3, the company says it doesn’t have any plans to report. However, the Web component, including face recognition, works fine on a Mac, and Picasa offers a free uploading utility for Macs that allows pictures to be sent to Picasa Web Albums directly from Apple’s (AAPL) iPhoto software.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the process of labeling photos with name tags. This provided a new way to sort images according to who was in each shot, and Picasa even found some hidden faces of friends I hadn’t seen in photos, giving me a new perspective on an old picture. Of course, the system isn’t perfect. A few things — including a lamppost — were falsely identified as faces in my photo albums, and it even requested name labels for the faces in photos I took of Renoir paintings.

There’s no way to completely turn name-tagging over to Picasa; you must manually assign a name to each face. But this discovery process grows smarter the more it is used, returning accurate, selectable name-tag suggestions below each photograph. A People page lists all the people whose faces appeared in uploaded photos, and I started relying on this as a quick reference tool. A photo name tag can include a nickname, full name and email. If someone is already listed in your Gmail contacts, these data are automatically retrieved and entered as you begin typing a name.

A Sync button at the top of each album in the Picasa desktop software assures users that any changes or edits made to photos in albums on the desktop will automatically be reflected in the Picasa Web Albums. I tested this many times, and uploaded photos changed quickly to match the desktop copy.

Picasa 3 offers customizable photo collages and Picasa Web Albums uses name tags to label faces in photos.

Instead of uploading photos from Picasa 3 to Picasa Web Albums and then sharing them from there, users can now hit a Share button in Picasa 3 that uploads images and emails them in one neat step. Privacy status on all albums is clearly marked, both in the desktop software and online in Picasa Web Albums, so you know if your album is private or public. These options can be adjusted in Settings, where the language used to describe sharing conditions is very clear. I liked the useful editing tools in Picasa 3, including an automatic crop tool that generated three cropping suggestion previews per photo.

Getting the Red Eye Out

A new automatic red-eye removal tool returned accurate results; it was easier to use than most because it identified red eye for me so I could fix it with one click. “Fill light,” a standby in Picasa, is a movable scale that adjusted and brightened dark, shadowy photos that were originally hard to distinguish. I even found photos that I had not previously seen in their entirety — including shots of the inside of Notre Dame Cathedral and a favorite photo of me with friends in front of a sunset.

Along with these other features, Picasa 3 has a shortcut button for easy uploading to Google’s Blogger service and one-step Geotagging, which adds location tags to photos. This software also includes a nice-looking built-in photo viewer for looking at all images on your PC. Picasa Web Albums has a mobile component and a new way of finding public photos from around the world, called Explore, which reminded me of searching on Flickr.

If you’re looking for a richer photo-sharing service that doesn’t confuse users when it comes to privacy, Picasa 3 and Picasa Web Albums are well worth your time. And name-tagging will change the way you sort through photos, though it would be more useful if it was available in the Picasa desktop software, as well as on Picasa Web Albums.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Freeing Google From the Desktop

Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:01:00 +0000

Google has been branching out from its search-engine roots to offer a variety of Web-based applications. Some of these, especially Gmail and Google Maps, have been well received and are quite popular on computers. Now the company wants us to use these and other applications away from the computer, too — on mobile devices.

This week, we put Google’s suite of mobile programs through the ringer to see if we might let it infiltrate our on-the-go lifestyle as easily as we’ve let Google search become an everyday part of our computer’s browser. Google offers five Web applications for downloading onto your mobile device including Maps, Gmail, SMS, Search and News.

We focused on the first three programs to see how they would fare on a tiny device with a smaller screen that demands more scrolling to view information that is normally contained in a single screen on a computer.

Overall, we were pleasantly surprised by Google Maps for mobile, Gmail for mobile, and Google SMS (Short Messaging Service), a system that uses text messaging to find answers about certain topics. The programs are visually attractive on smaller screens, and didn’t require much practice, catering to people who want quick assistance without much fuss.

And Gmail for mobile lets you open attachments containing photos, Microsoft Word documents and PDFs — a capability typically only found on Treos, BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile smart phones, not cellphones.

Google Inc. isn’t alone in this field. Many companies, including its rival, Yahoo Inc., make mobile applications for cellphones, and this category is likely to keep growing.

We used three mobile devices for our Google tests: the $80 Samsung A900M cellphone from Sprint, the $225 Samsung Drift cellphone, from a new phone carrier called Helio and the $400 Palm Treo 700p with Verizon service (all prices include two-year contracts). Your cellphone carrier must use Java programming language to work with Maps and Gmail for mobile; Verizon does not. The Treo works with Google Maps for mobile but not with this new Gmail version. Any phone with text messaging capability can use Google SMS.

These Google mobile applications are free to download, but your cellphone carrier may charge you for Web browsing or text messaging, depending on your plan.

To download any of these applications, you can go to www.google.com/mobile and enter your cellphone number, triggering the site to send a text message to your device with a URL link for the program you want to download. Or you can enter the URL (found on the Web site) into your cellphone’s browser. We tried both methods with success, downloading Google Maps for mobile in 10 seconds during one test.

Our Sprint Samsung A900M came preloaded with Gmail for mobile, so we quickly entered our Gmail username and password to get started. In seconds, our screen was filled with up to six emails at a time, each clearly divided by lines. Each email’s subject, sender and date were visible on our tiny screen, written in a legible font that didn’t seem squeezed. New emails were listed in bold type.

We used the phone’s directional buttons to scroll up or down, highlighting and selecting emails to read them. Each email read much like on a computer screen, but (thankfully) without the advertisements that Gmail usually lists along the right side of a computer screen.

Email attachments were easy to open and read; we opened a Microsoft Word document and a digital photo in JPG format, the photo was shrunk to fit onto our phone’s screen so we didn’t have to scroll. Attachments can’t be edited.

You can perform every action in Gmail for mobile that you can in regular Gmail, including replying to and starring emails, searching through messages, reporting spam and archiving. We searched through emails for the word “Walt” and quickly got a list of relevant emails, and an email that we sent from the phone was received on the other end in seconds. Tasks performed in Gmail for mobile automatically synched with our Gmail account.

Google Maps for mobile was familiar and simple. After downloading it and opening it on our cellphone, we entered our ZIP Code and a map of Washington, D.C., appeared on the entire screen. A list with Find Business, Find Location and Directions options helped us narrow our search.

The select button on each of our devices zoomed in on the map, and scrolling around with directional buttons moved the map accordingly. We quickly switched between map view and satellite view, the latter showing us detailed aerial shots of our tree-filled neighborhoods. A Show Traffic option color-codes highways in 30 major cities to show how fast the cars in that area are moving.

We searched for our local Four Seasons hotel by typing “Four Seasons” into the Find Business section of Google Maps for mobile. Nine results were returned, the second was the hotel. The hotel’s address, phone number, parking fees, room rates and acceptable credit cards were also listed.

The Helio Samsung Drift cellphone comes preloaded with Google’s Maps for mobile, and also has built-in GPS capability. This feature lets you press “0″ when using Google’s mapping program on your phone; a tiny circle marks where you are on the map.

The Google SMS mobile tool is fun to use, and doesn’t require a download. We just sent questions via text message to GOOGL, or 46645 on the numeric keypad. Various data can be retrieved including local listings, weather, sports scores, trivia, movie times and translations.

We asked for George Bush’s age and got the 41st president’s birthday sent back in a text message a second after our question was sent (June 12, 1924, if you’re curious). While on the way to an Irish pub for dinner, we typed in the slightly odd name of the place and its ZIP Code (RiRa 22201) and got a local listing response, including the address and phone number for the two RiRa Irish Pubs in the area.

Sometimes we had to rephrase our inquiry to receive a helpful Google response, and if you don’t have text messaging included in your phone’s plan, this could get costly. But as we used Google SMS more, we got better at asking questions the right way.

If you use a computer every day, chances are good that you’re spoiled by being able to retrieve helpful data within seconds, thanks to the Internet. Google’s mobile applications give you that convenience on the go, in a way that doesn’t leave you missing your computer.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

An Easier Way to Send Large Email Attachments

Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:01:00 +0000

How many times have you wanted to email a large attachment — like a bunch of digital photos, an album of songs, or a hefty video — but didn’t do so because it exceeded your email provider’s, or the recipient’s, limits on attachment size, or because it might max out the recipient’s mailbox?

This frustration is growing increasingly common as better digital cameras produce bigger photos and large video clips, and digital music becomes more widespread. Computer hard disks have grown nicely to accommodate these files, but limits on the size of email messages haven’t. And, even if you could send such large attachments, it can take forever to send them via email, partly because broadband upload speeds lag far behind download speeds.

Instead of suffering the frustration of a bounced email, many folks have resorted to Web-based services like Shutterfly or Kodak EasyShare Gallery or YouTube.com or Google Video for sharing digital photos and videos. They upload the files to these sites, then send links to their friends and family. But this method has major drawbacks. The recipients don’t get the full-size files on their own computers, and sometimes must register with the sites to view your material.

This week, we tested a new, free, application called Pando that aims to solve this problem without requiring you to use an intermediary Web site. Pando lets you email huge attachments — up to one gigabyte each — to anyone, without breaching email size limits, or clogging anyone’s inbox. It comes in versions for both Windows and Macintosh computers, available for downloading at www.pando.com.

It sounded fishy to us, too, but Pando, from Pando Networks Inc., performed really well in our tests — even in its current “beta,” or trial, stage. It’s simple, fast, and effective, and it solves the large-attachment problem.

Pando works by merging the mechanism of email with its own small program and a modified version of BitTorrent, a back-end file-transfer system best known until now for speeding up the downloading of large, unauthorized files, like pirated movies.

Here’s how you use Pando. First, you download and install the small Pando program. Then, you select the files you want to send. These can be any type of files you want, or even whole folders of files. Then, still using the Pando software, you type in the addresses of the recipients, the subject, and a message. The software then does three things: it creates a Pando Package, a small special file that instructs the recipient’s computer on how to fetch the files; it sends an email containing that package file, plus any text you want; and it uploads the files to a Pando server.

On the recipient’s end, an email is received in his or her normal email program containing the Pando Package as a tiny attachment (one huge 94 megabyte attachment we sent required only a 22-kilobyte attachment). The recipient just opens the Pando Package attachment, and it in turn launches the Pando software, which then downloads the files or folders you sent. The first time the recipient receives a Pando email, he or she will have to download and install the Pando software. There’s a link in the email to the download site.

Once downloaded onto the receiver’s computer, all Pando files can be found in a special folder that Pando automatically creates. In Windows, it’s called My Pando Packages and is in My Documents. On the Mac, it’s called Pando Packages and is in the home folder. The files are also listed in the handy Received list in the Pando software.

As a bonus, Pando can sometimes transmit these large files faster than your email program or Web browser could. That’s because it uses a modified version of the speedy BitTorrent technology.

We downloaded and installed Pando in just a few minutes. Opening the small Pando email attachment from Microsoft Outlook on Windows or Apple Mail on the Mac prompted a little Pando window to pop up, in which all sent and received files were organized. This window is simple, showing a thumbnail image and text description of each file. A list of received files shows who sent the file and when; the sent list shows to whom you sent files and when.

We started out big, sharing a 95-megabyte, high-resolution video. You must create a username and password to send using Pando, which we did, entering our email and first and last names. A simple “Send New” icon opens the email-like form, where we dragged and dropped this big video file.

No Pando Package can total more than one gigabyte, and an automatic tally shows you how large the Package is becoming as you drag and drop more files into it.

The Pando software program allows users to send large email attachments without running afoul of normal size limitations.

Another way to send files using Pando is by right-clicking on any file or folder in your computer and selecting a “Send With Pando” option that appears after the software application is downloaded. Selecting this also opens the familiar sending window. But this works only in Windows.

The 95-megabyte video took eight minutes to upload, and nine minutes to download — impressively fast times. Another Pando Package filled with 44 high-resolution digital photos totaling 65 megabytes took six minutes to upload, and six minutes to receive.

But Pando can’t entirely overcome slow Internet connections, so your speeds may vary considerably. This is especially true on the uploading side, as even broadband cable and DSL connections typically offer upload speeds that are a fraction of their download speeds. In our tests, at our office and homes, our download and upload speeds ranged from 30 kilobits per second to 250, depending on where we were and when we were testing.

Even if you didn’t see any speed improvement with Pando, you’d still benefit from the sheer ability to send huge attachments. That’s a big deal.

On July 25, Pando Networks will introduce a special plug-in for Outlook, making it even easier for users to send huge files without worrying about inbox congestion. And the company also has plans to introduce plug-ins for Web-based email programs like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail.

If you’re tired of bounced emails, and of using Web sites to share your personal videos or photos, Pando is a straightforward solution that anyone can understand in a matter of minutes. It’s a great solution to a vexing problem.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.