Google may not have as many users as behemoth webmail competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo!, but its Gmail service is still praised for its minimalist design and practical features. It's not perfect though, and the biggest complaint is that it doesn't have enough features. Case in point: folks have been begging for a "to-do list"-like task manager since day one. The feature has finally arrived, and it's oh-so-creatively called "Tasks." Is it destined to be an essential tool in your day-to-day life, or just a toy you'll quickly forget? 

Tasks is part of Google Labs, which means that it's still in testing, so you'll have to turn it on by going to the Gmail Labs page. Once you activate it, you can select any e-mail and make a task out of it by clicking the "More Actions" menu at the top of the Inbox.

While you can also create a task from scratch, the e-mail method reflects the way you probably already use Gmail: e-mailing your colleagues and even yourself with stuff to do. Tasks functions more as a scribbling pad for notes than it does as a full scheduling system. In fact, it's not even integrated with Google Calendar — an unfortunate downside that we hope Google will remedy before this graduates from Labs status.

Gmail was never meant to be an all-powerful monster like Microsoft Outlook, and if you need the features that something like Outlook has, we don't imagine you'd be using this for your e-mail anyway. But Tasks has a few special tricks up its digital sleeve; for example, you can create multiple lists — say, one for work tasks and one for personal stuff —and swap between them with ease. Google has also provided a slew of easy-to-use keyboard commands, which is unusual for a web application but welcome nonetheless.

All this makes for a great tool the functionality of which extends naturally from the way people have been using Gmail for ages. If you have your e-mail open on a computer in front of you for a sizeable chunk of the day, and you want to keep track of a small list of things to take care of one afternoon at a time, you couldn't have asked for a whole lot more.

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