Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Email and Tablets

When changing from towers to tablets, as many are doing, the question frequently comes up as to what to do about your email and address books

 Older users often say they want to stay with their old email and convert their address lists to the new device. Often they have been using Outlook or AOL.

 For many reasons it is better to switch to they new email service and email address. The email of choice is Gmail , which works on all devices and also provides the best search engine and capability to create documents of all kinds. Further Gmail is kept safe on the Internet cloud and automatically synchronizes across multiple devices.

 If the address book is small, it is simplest to reenter the address book into Gmail. Conversion is awkward. Conversion requires exporting from the old files into Gmail. This can be technical and time consuming. 

Keeping the old email address is usually not even possible. It is best to bite the bullet and establish a new Gmail address. Informing others of the new address is easy. All that needs to be done is to send one email to all addresses advising of the new email address

. The most challenging task of shifting over to Gmail is simply signing up. What you do is to do a search for Gmail sign up and follow the instructions to establish an account. That new so-called account will be needed to keep track of all your activity on the web, where everything will be shifting over. You will use your account over and over again to keep track of your work.

 For example, if you buy a book, the provider will need to know that you own it and keep backup access to it on the cloud. That way also you will be able to work from any computer anywhere as long as connected to the cloud. You will be safe from losing information. 

Google is the main player in the cloud although Microsoft and Apple are starting to shift to it. Although signing up for Gmail can be a nuisance, the future benefits are to simplify what you do.

 The end result will be that you will be able to pull out your small tablet and check email, news, ebooks, tasks, and so on just by looking at the screen , or at most, with a few taps. Nearly all the other capabilities of your larger computer will be available from the cloud in the small device. 

Dictated and published to my Nexus 7 tablet 12-19-2012