Microsoft has launched Outlook for iOS and Android. The Android version is still a preview, but it’s available for download. Outlook for iOS is available for download in the Apple iTunes Store.
Look and feel of Outlook for iOS and Android
A video below shows the look and feel of the new email client on both iPhone and iPad.
Also, here are a few screenshots of Outlook for iOS. Below is a group of ‘Focused’ emails, which means the ones that are important to you. The rest of the emails sits in the ‘Other’ group. Furthermore, this Focused Inbox works across all email accounts regardless of type.
Outlook now offers a one-click unsubscribe from newsletters: pretty convenient for everyone who’d like to unsubscrube.
A view of the swipe action options: archive and delete.
A few screenshots of the Android version:
Outlook for iOS and Android: worth the wait?
It took a while for Microsoft to release Outlook for mobile devices. This seems like an odd thing as mobile has grown steadily in the past 5 years. Now that it has launched, let’s compare it to the standard Mail app for iOS.
A big difference here is that Outlook is a business email client at its core. This means you can easily access your work calendar from the Outlook app on mobile: something not available in the Mail app. You’d have to switch between the Calendar and Mail app, which can become tiresome when doing a lot of scheduling via email. However, calendar functionality is limited on smartphones, compared to Outlook on tablets: we’re not there yet for full calendar functionality.
Next to the calendar, attachements handling is limited at best with the Mail app. Inserting an attachement from the cloud is not an option. Outlook for iOS and Android however offers all sorts of cloud attachement options, including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.
Outlook for mobile is based on an app called Acompli. The company behind Acompli was acquired by Microsoft in November 2014. Read more about the company and the acquisition here.
Download Outlook for iOS and Android
You can download Outlook for iOS in the iTunes Store here. Outlook for Android is available on Google Play here.
More info can be found on the Microsoft Outlook blog. The original announcement can be found here, and a deeper look into the new email client app can be found here.
