Relying on a propietary tool for backups is an awful idea - you can't be sure you can trust it, or that you will be able to restore this backups.

The lack of portability is a shame though, I wonder why screen-sharing is usually windows-only.

The website says "only supported on chrome". Nice way to use web standards, recommend a single browser, instead of sniffing capabilities.

I'd mod this funny if I had points!

I'm looking for something similar, but the lack of portability is a killer for me.

That's quite right. So this patent is quite useless against Android, because Android is covered by the patent that say "... on a mobile device".

Looks like an attack against google itself; not Android.

Or something way more mainstream: GAMING! I can sure as hell tell the difference between a 2013 and a 2011 video card with a very graphic-intensive computer game. I guess this article's author forgot that facebook and email isn't a computer's only use.

Yes they do, they support IMAP IDLE perfectly fine. Some of the references to this are 6 years old. IDLE is about 16yo, and supported by most email clients.

1) The \Recent flag is used by plenty of mail clients.
2) Substring searches are used for, uhm, searches.
3) Sieve equals filters. Plenty of users out there use filters. If you say "you can create them from the gmail interface", then you're only proving that third party clients aren't compatible.
4) The \Answered flag is pretty hand since most clients will properly detonate when a mail has been replied to (or not). The tag being lost is pretty bad, since it will just confuse the user.

The motor vehicle was not equipped with any of the above actualy. It's equipped onto the driver's head.

Sure, they're standard, and it's cool if gmail implemented them compeltely

Yes they are, they decided to implement their IMAP support in a non-standard way.
Also, plenty of other issues ARE their fault.

I've never used activesync in my life, and yet have not had issues with my email providers. Maybe iOS needs IMAP support? You know, the standard protocol that almost everybody supports (I'm sure there are exceptions).

Also, Contacts != Mail.

- Their IMAP support is broken (as they themselves have documented; you can google that).
  - If you use the webmail view, and real IMAP folders, you'll end up with a mess on both sides.
  - There's no way to manage filters from a third party cliente (eg: via Sieve).