I think I must have been one of the few users to like the Gmail app.

It's great for a number of reasons:

1) It doesn't weigh down your BB with loads of email in the core system
2) You load it up when YOU want to read your email, not when the email comes through
3) Closing it is a nice way of forgetting about work
4) You could search all your old mail

I actually got stuck in Madrid airport without BIS quite recently, so I tried the mobile web version of gmail. It was a terrible experience - it was unresponsive, the ui was too big, yet too cluttered, waiting for 2 pages to reload every time you wanted to look at a new email etc etc was a pain. And this was on wifi on Blackberrys latest and greatest (9900)

Long story short I will miss the gmail app. IT wasn't great, but it had a lot of plus points. Sure, I can got get the gmail plugin and set it up via the native app, but if I wanted to do that I'd have done it in the first place.

I've only recently converted to blackberry, I'm a fussy bugger about keyboards and it really can't be beaten. This makes me sad.

I guess you've never worked in retail, nor understand quite how retail works.

Do you not sell on price alone. If this were the case the world would be full of geeks running e-stores out of bedrooms which allow for the lowest overheads thus the smallest margin.

Customers (outside of /. (they do exist)) generally want advice, the unwashed masses aren't supergeeks like we are. Bricks and Mortar stores allow customers to compare ranges of products in the flesh and speak to a real person who has likely had years of training and experience.

We've got to a situation now where these stores are browsed at the weekends, the customer uses the shops expertise, nice warm displays etc then the first thing they do when they get to work on a monday is buy it online. This is obviously not a sustainable model for retail, which a large percentage of our economy is based on.

Further to counter you point, even the online PRICE COMPARISON engines have been moving away from purely PRICE listings. They all have an element of customer service reviews, and now most of them recommend a "smart choice" which is the cheapest of the retailers with x% positive feedback. As you might have guessed, the retailers operating on the smallest margins are often those who don't provide the service, so this recommended retailer isn't always the cheapest.

I work in eCommerce, in particular the high end AV and home electricals' market. "Premium" brands have been penalising eCommerce only ventures for a number of years now. It can be as simple as giving traditional retailers better retro (% of turn over paid back once a year) and has harsh as limited stock. The same goes on in online photography. To be clear, we're not an online only brand, we have a number of high street stores with decent turnover. Now, the manufacturers are getting even tougher. The amount of premium brands we've had to take off our website in the past 6 months to keep our decent terms for the traditional is shocking. These weren't small accounts either, they run into 7 figures of the UKs finest GBP. Why? The brands think by selling online you're selling on price (which is largely true thanks to sites like pricegrabber, pricerunner, kelkoo etc) and this devalues their brand. How they control the market is nothing short of cartel like, but it's not going to change, only get worse if this law comes into effect. FWIW, even as someone who is struggling to do online business thanks to these they do have a point. Pure, price comparison based online shopping will eventually leave us with very few trained product experts or the ability to see products in the "flesh" before buying online. A balance needs to be found.

And in other news, satan is ice skating to work today.