Windows Vista ships with an upgraded mail program called Windows Mail, the successor to Outlook Express. The program is sleek and slightly updated with a fast search feature. It's nice that the same shortcut, Ctrl-E, takes you to the search field in the Vista shell, Mail, Internet Explorer, Maxthon and Firefox.

But Windows Mail's new junk mail catcher is a great lesson in how not to design a mail filter.

• It runs before your own mail rules run, so forget about deleting persistent spam from the server -- the junk mail folder makes sure you'll see it now and forever
• It's case-sensitive, so you have to type in not just 'Viagra' but also 'viagra' and 'VIAGRA' for it to work
• There's no way for search terms to work across all fields, so you have to separately type in 'Viagra' for subject, from and body
• It doesn't support regular expressions, and there's no easy hook for an external mail filter, so you can't use more powerful filters to augment its own

The first issue is the key one, and I've had to turn off the built-in filter so my own rules get first look at the mail queue.

The MacBook Air is without doubt a beautiful machine, but a lot of its appeal derives from a canny visual trick: gradually beveled edges. It looks a lot thinner than other ultraportables, but there isn't much difference. The back of the laptop is 0.76" thick, the front after the beveling a quarter inch less.

The screen is actually big enough that the laptop doesn't look small. When the screen stretches 13", as it does with the MacBook Air, you'd want a paper-thin body. But this body is just beveled more subtly. IMO subnotebooks like the Asus Eee look sexier because they're absolutely tiny. (That's not to claim their fit 'n finish is as pretty.)

The MacBook Air's screen is highly reflective, which is painful when you're near a window. Apple doesn't offer a matte screen for this model. The machine's keyboard is chiclet style, and low-profile with little travel and an unsatisfying feel. On CPU, the laptop is pretty but expensive and gutless, like an early PT Cruiser or Mazda Miata.

Buying upgrades from Apple is like getting your car serviced at the dealer: expect a steep markup. On the Air, you pay $300 for a minor CPU speed bump from 1.6 to 1.8 GHz. That's the cost of a whole new Asus Eee subnotebook, a complete 3.0 GHz processor, a 1.5 terabyte hard disk and so on.

I once ran into a Toshiba exec on an airplane who quietly showed me a gorgeous little subnotebook not yet released in the U.S.: the Libretto. For the next few years the only way to get a fully-functional PC that size -- half the size and weight of a notebook, running standard Windows programs -- was to fork out double the cost of a regular laptop for something like a Fujitsu Lifebook.

So Asus' hugely popular Eee subnote, which runs Vista, XP and Linux for $300, is a game changer. The machine itself is light and adorable, little bigger than a paperback. You could throw it into a backpack for an afternoon of surfing at a café without thinking twice. Sure, its 7" screen is a bit small. The original has wide black bezels on both sides, placeholders for the new model with a 10" screen.

But the real sticking point is the keyboard. With smaller keys than usual, it falls between thumb keyboards and full-size standard ones. I've spent some time typing on the Eee, and even when using only the tips of my fingers, it definitely crimped my typing speed.

Here's a possible solution. Back in Palm Pilot days, I used a full-size keyboard which folded into a 'w' shape and was little bigger than the Pilot in its carrying case. The Stowaway keyboard was comfortable, fast to type on and relatively cheap. On plenty of overseas trips, I took notes with the keyboard and my Palm V rather than bringing a full-size laptop.

Right now the barrier is that the 'w'-shaped Stowaway keyboard seems to come mainly with Bluetooth -- the USB version is hard to find -- and the Eee has to be hacked to support Bluetooth. Portable keyboards which support USB generally don't fold. The closest I've found so far is the Matias folding keyboard, which supports USB. Another option is the TabletKiosk USB folding keyboard, which is smaller because it omits the number pad.

But I still haven't found a 'w'-shaped USB keyboard which accordions into something tiny. So I'll probably track down a used USB Stowaway.

Eee User discusses this here and here.

At 2 am one recent morning, I uploaded an 8x10 family photo and a few 5x7's to a drugstore chain's web site. At 7 am they emailed to say the photos had come out of the printer at the local store. By 9 am, lo and behold, there they were.

They should take it to the next logical step: just let users print to the big machine as if it were a local photo printer. It should be: File / Print to > My local drugstore.

When you search for someone on the social networking site Friendster, the private-labeled Google page shows results from the entire Web unless you specify that you want to search Friendster. I'm not sure whether Google paid Friendster to do this -- they have a deal -- or Friendster is trying to increase ad revenue independent of Google. But it's extremely annoying.

The same is true on Boston.com: search does not show you Boston Globe articles unless you specify that you want to search the newspaper rather than the entire Web. They use some private-labeled search engine other than Google, and this too is probably an attempt to get ad revenue. But it completely breaks the search feature by focusing on the wrong default case.

In tossing menus and toolbars in favor of a single unified, context-sensitive ribbon, the Office 2007 team voiced its frustration with discoverability. Users were constantly writing in asking for features which already existed or complaining they couldn't find features in the product. The large ribbon was also driven by a shift toward WYSIWYG previews. To be effective, galleries of themes and effects need significant space on screen.

Most people I've heard from who've tried Office 2007 get crabby about having to learn a whole new interface. They can't find features they already know how to use. One friend gave up on finding the print feature because he didn't recognize the big Office icon at top left as a button.

The Office team's argument is that usability tests show higher productivity after a short period of relearning. But keep in mind that Clippy the animated paper clip got through the usability gauntlet too. The ribbon's radically different user interface means lots of users will need to be retrained. And the ribbon's context sensitivity means you have to go hunt through each tab to find the feature you want.

However, the ribbon does some things very well:

• Every button is labeled, because most users don't put in the time to hover over every button and read every tooltip. Internet Explorer 3 popularized this in modern desktop app design.
• The giant previews are both useful and sexy
• Context-sensitive 'tuckaway' tabs don't resize the editing area, which can be jarring

The new ribbon will be made a control in a Visual Studio update. Once users are trained in Office 2007, it will make sense to use the new interface. But at a time when many users see older versions of Office as good enough, the transition could take a long time against significant user resistance.

The iPhone is as much a letdown for this longtime Apple fan as the man hands of Seinfeld's hot date. I was primed to love this shiny precious, to gently nudge its ovoid edges into my technological nest. I even switched mobile phone companies and, on the weekend of the iPhone's release, trooped down to the Apple store to see my baby-to-be.

What I saw quenched my affection. The iPhone's design is a triumph of flashiness over usability. At every point, the designers chose chrome over day-to-day use. I can understand why they did it: to create sexy demos and to justify the iPhone's stratospheric price. But sheer lickability won't sate your appetite.

The iPhone's keyboard-free design is useless for high-speed typing. Forget about using your thumbs. Even hunt 'n peck with the on-screen keyboard takes spellcheck on steroids just to get you to George Bush fluency. Trusting AutoCorrect is like trusting your airbags: they're supposed to be a last resort.

Those claiming to have reached 100% accuracy on the iPhone's virtual keyboard are either yoga masters or liars. At best, your email will look like it was typed by a mentally-challenged gerbil. And that is nit wjat yiu wsnt. (Sent from my iPhone.)

Then there's Steve Jobs' jihad against labels. One of the top iPod support issues was reportedly how to turn it on. Not only is the iPhone's power button not labeled, neither is the silent mode switch. They're just baffling little strips of smug black plastic floating in a silver sea, thinner and more stylish than you'll ever be.

The phone doesn't start with the numeric keypad you expect. Instead, it begins in a dashboard cluttered with sixteen garish, full-color icons advertising useless functions like weather. If you're walking around with your mobile phone, you probably already know whether it's raining.

What you really want is to get to your friends' phone numbers. But the iFlash foils you again: you can't jump to 'Steve' by typing the first two letters of his name. Instead, you have to go to your S's and then scroll through all of them by flicking. The same is true when setting an appointment in the future. You can't just choose the next year; instead you have to rotate what looks like slot machine wheels, one month at a time. This is apparatchik, not iChic.

The iPhone's wide-screen Web browser promises great things. But it loads Web sites with an illegible thumbnail. Tap on an article, and you're dumped again into a 50,000-foot snapshot rather than the text of the story. It takes four taps - browser, zoom, story, zoom - to accomplish anything useful.

The ad campaign for the iPhone makes much of its pinch and open gestures for zooming. But in real life, they're sloppy and prone to triggering nearby hyperlinks. As I tried zooming in on an online map, the mushiness of the pinch left me longing for a plain old slider.

The much-hyped Cover Flow feature, a slick way to scroll through album art, is pointless and undiscoverable. It's pointless because, as Apple's own iTunes has proven, music buyers now think of music as tracks rather than albums. It's undiscoverable because to start this feature, you enter music mode, scratch your head, read the manual, and then turn the iPhone 90 degrees on its side. Trust Apple to design a feature so non-intuitive, it makes a Moroccan souk look friendly.

The iPhone designers deserve kudos for reimagining the smart phone for those handicapped by loss of stylus. We smartphone users roam our cities substituting a finger for a point, a pose much in vogue when commenting on blogs. We are the walking wounded, and we are everywhere. But you can't select text precisely with the stub of your meaty finger, and thus the iPhone omits even cut 'n paste. In the pursuit of gloss, Apple has pared actual usefulness to the cuticle.

The first attempt at an iPhone is as over-ambitious as Apple's earlier flop, the Newton. It's the second coming of the Jesus phone which I await.