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Outlook comes to iOS and Android

By Ng Chong Seng - on 30 Jan 2015, 4:39pm

Outlook comes to iOS and Android

Just two months after buying Acompli, a mobile email app developer that has clients on both Android and iOS, Microsoft has pushed out an Outlook email app that’s very much based on the Acompli app.

Available for Android and iOS, the Outlook mobile app separates your mail into two tabs: Focused and Other. As the names imply, important emails will appear in your Focused inbox, while the rest remain in Other. And when you move email in or out of your Focused inbox, Outlook will learn more about what’s important to you for better future grouping. Outlook also comes with swipe gestures for rapid email triage. For example, you can swipe right or left to take actions like archive, delete, move, flag, mark as read/unread, or schedule; and these swipe gestures can be personalized to match your habits. For email that you’ve no time to reply now, you can use the ‘Schedule Email’ feature to temporarily remove it from your inbox, and have it return at a later time.

Other convenient features include the ability to quickly find the people you emailed with most often, and find the files and meetings you’ve shared with them; in-app calendar integration (so you can view meeting details, share available meeting times without leaving the app); and support for cloud storage services, like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, for attachments. If you’ve a large-screen device, say an iPad or an Android tablet, there will be additional views, like a two paned email list, week view in calendar, and the ability to see a preview of your files, to make full use of the larger screen.

What about email service support? Don’t worry, the new Microsoft is much more friendlier these days. Outlook works with Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, iCloud, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail.

A busy period for the Office team

In addition to the new Outlook mobile apps, Microsoft is removing the ‘preview’ label from Office for Android apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). That said, the Outlook app for Android will retain the preview label as it’s behind the iOS version in terms of features and performance. Microsoft says it’ll remove the label once the Android version has caught up with the iOS version.

And as we’ve shared recently, Microsoft is working on a touch and mobile-optimized version of Office for Windows 10, as well as Office 2016 for the desktop.

OneDrive updates

On a somewhat related note, Microsoft has also released OneDrive for Business for Mac and iOS yesterday. This came just after the OneDrive team detailed some of the new photo-related features that have arrived or are coming to the cloud storage service.

Source: Office Blog, OneDrive Blog (1, 2).

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