“Tasks” in Gmail and the Android G1
Being a long time Microsoft Outlook user (let’s face it, it IS a killer application) one thing I missed when moving to Google was the Tasks feature. I always found it handy for creating and managing to-do lists and the early stages of various projects. Google Labs had been offering as Tasks solution as a beta product through Gmail but yesterday the other part of that equation fell into place. You can now access a mobile version of Google Tasks from your phone or internet capable PDA, including the iPhone and Android G1. If you’d like to give it a whirl here is how to activate Tasks in Gmail and then access it on your phone.
- Sign into Gmail
- Click on Settings
- Click on the Labs tab
- Find Tasks from the list of Labs projects and click on Enable.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes.
You should now have a new feature on the left hand side of your Gmail interface called Tasks, located just beneath Contacts. Accessing Tasks will bring up an overlay panel in the lower right hand corner of your browser window (if you prefer you can make it into a pop-up window by clicking the arrow icon in its upper right hand corner, next to the minimize and close icons).
From here the rest is a pretty clean interface providing the bastic Task management tools. You can add, delete, move, indent, prioritize and date your tasks. Add and manipulate a few Tasks to get a feel for it.
What’s missing? In my opinion Tasks should really be tied in tighter with Google Calendar and have an alarm/alert feature. Really want to win my heart? Add Sharing/Collaboration functionality and tie in Google Docs as well for project management and flow capabilities.
Mobile Version:
Simply access the following URL from your mobile device: http://gmail.com/tasks
