And the verdict is?

I have to say that I'm pretty impressed by Google Desktop. It's fairly unobtrusive and not too resource intensive. I list those two items first because I think they are the most important. In addition it has some very nice and very smart features. It picks up RSS feeds just by visiting a website. My recent history had both this blog and my brother's blog and it picked them up right away. A quick jump over to Fark.com and ESPN.com got me further RSS feeds without any effort. At that point I noticed that I was picking up ESPN's main RSS feed which included numerous crappy baseball and basketball. A quick jump into the college football, NFL and Soccer sections of the website and picked up those feeds (thanks ESPN) and then with a quick click I was able to remove the ESPN main feed and waalaa! No more baseball cluttering up my desktop :)

The desktop has a email tap in that doesn't quite work (it seems like it should be able to preview the mail items like the RSS feeds but you can't). You can still double click your way to your email though so that's nice.

There's also a scratch pad and a viewing pain that cycles through pictures on your hard drive in a folder you specify. This is a fairly new item for google but there's already a system monitor add-in among other things.

All in all I think google has another hit here but this one isn't quite the clearcut winner that gmail is. I'm sure that it'll get tweaked though so keep your eyes open.