Microsoft rolled out the new Outlook apps for iOS and Android mobile device users. The version for Apple devices is fully functional while the Android version is for testing.
The apps' debut came after Microsoft acquired Acompli, an email startup, for the sum of $200 million in the latter part of 2014. The company, which has its headquarters located in San Francisco, had launched an iOS version of their email app in April 2014 and followed it up with an Android version in September. The apps featured a number of integrations such as calendar, Exchange and Gmail.
"Despite the smartphone becoming a primary screen for reading email, most of us perform only basic email triage on the phone, delaying the rest to deal with on the computer," said by the Outlook Team in a blog post.
The team added that with the new Outlook app, customers become more equipped with the core tools to help them in getting things done. These include handling calendar, email, files and contacts which customers can work on even on their device's small screen.
"Outlook also lets you pivot on People, so you can see the people you email with most often and easily find all the emails, meetings and files shared with those people," continued the team in the blog post.
The new apps will be an important addition to users who have been using Outlook for quite some time now and as such had largely relied on either web apps or third-party email apps. Technically, Microsoft had mobile versions of Outlook through OWA which was available to users of iPhone and to some who use Android. However, the app was limited to business users of Office 365. This means that users with personal accounts and accounts with outlook.com couldn't use the service. They have also found that the user experience seemed to be lacking.
"Let's face it, OWA isn't even really an app," said CEO Javier Soltero of Acompli who joined Microsoft as a result of the acquisition. "It's a slow-loading web app wrapped in native Chrome."
Other notable features of the new Outlook apps include the ability to separate mails into two tabs namely Focused and Other; the ability to temporarily remove email from the inbox and have it returned at a chosen time (Schedule Email); the ability to quickly search the right emails, people and files by just typing a few letters; and the ability to respond to calendar-scheduled meetings right from one's inbox even without having to open the mail.
