Gmail allows custom themes, background photos and images

The people at Google's Gmail team have now enabled a much-awaited feature requested long and hard by Gmail users: the ability to create custom themes, with background photos and images, for their Gmail inbox.

Gmail announced the custom theme with photos and images feature on its official blog last night (Indian time). "For a while, you've been able to set your own colors, and starting today you can customize your inbox with your own background image too," Gmail said on its blog.

As can be seen from the image above, if you click on Mail Settings > Themes, in your Gmail inbox, you will now see a Create your own theme option at the end of all the available themes. You can tinker with background color (if you don't have a ready background image to upload for now), text color, link color and more. Just give it a try, if you are a Gmail user.
The ability to upload your own photo and image in Gmail works similar to uploading a custom photo to your Google.com webpage. Any image you save as the background of your Gmail inbox will be accessible from wherever you log into your Gmail webmail inbox.
Does uploading a background image make your Gmail inbox heavy? Or is everything just fine?

MacBook Air: 11-inch, 13-inch comes to India

Apple's new MacBook Air, launched in the U.S. at Apple's Back to the Mac event last month, has finally started appearing in retail stores and Apple resellers across India. This includes both the MacBook Air models: the improved 13-inch model and the all new 11-inch MacBook Air ultraportable.

Apart from being thin and light (especially the 11-inch model), the new MacBook Air ultraportables don't feature a spinning drive or an SSD slotted inside. Instead, both the new MacBook Air models sport on-board (soldered onto the motherboard) Flash storage: spanning from 64GB all the way up to 256GB. Both the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models sport Intel Core 2 Duo processors and Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics.
MacBook Air: Price, Availability
The 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air will be available through the Apple Authorized Resellers in India. The 1.4-GHz 11-inch MacBook Air with 2GB of memory and 64GB of flash storage starts at a price of Rs. 60,900 with a 128GB model for Rs. 72,900. The 1.86 GHz 13-inch MacBook Air with 2GB of memory and 128GB of flash storage starts at a price of Rs. 79,900 with a 256GB model availabe for Rs. 98,900. Configure-to-order options and accessories include faster processors, 4GB of memory, MacBook Air SuperDrive and a USB Ethernet Adapter.
Tip: Students are eligible for certain discounts on Mac purchases. So if you think MacBooks are costly, this should (hopefully) ease the blow on your pocket.

RIM Playbook to support Android apps : )

RIM PlayBook enthusiasts, more reason to be happy. RIM said on Thursday it will allow optional "app players" to be bundled with the PlayBook tablet which will have run-time environments for BlackBerry Java and Android 2.3 apps from BlackBerry App World.

Porting over the ability to run Android apps on the RIM PlayBook tablet which runs on BlackBerry Tablet OS is a welcome move.
It is also an admission: lack of enough apps for the PlayBook on its existing Blackberry Tablet OS platform. RIM is no doubt leveraging the strength of Android, and its thriving community of app developers, to get a piece of the action, so to speak -- instead of wooing developers on to its platform.

According to RIM, developers will still have to submit their apps for approval to the App World. The Android apps will run in a sandbox on the PlayBook to keep them secure. RIM is also planning to release a native SDK for developers to build PlayBook apps a lot easier.
Earlier in the week, RIM revealed the pricing of the PlayBook tablet (US $499 starting price) and its availability in the U.S. starting April 19.