Microsoft Outlook for iOS review: This email app leaves all others behind

Microsoft’s Outlook app for iOS was released at the end of last month and as we had noted at the time, the app was already getting rave reviews , within hours of its release. The app which supports Gmail, Exchange, YahooMail, etc, has an inbuilt calendar, syncs with Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive is being seen as better alternate to even the official Gmail app on iPhone. So is Microsoft’s Outlook app worth the hype? Well I’ve been using the app for the last two weeks and I have to say I’ve not felt the need to open the Gmail app since then. Is the app perfect? No, there is definite scope for improvement. There are somethings (like categorising email) that Gmail and Inbox by Gmail tend to do better. But yes, it’s one of the best email apps I’ve used and definitely the fastest email app on iOS. We take a look what works and what doesn’t: Features: Setting up accounts is pretty easy. You can set up multiple accounts on the same app and you can even choose if you want to view each inbox separately or view them all together. Just slide to the left side of the app and it will show you the options. Outlook, Exchange, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, Box, Dropbox and OneDrive are all supported; thus the app covers almost all major service providers, which is great news. You can thus sync your Gmail and Office mail in the same app and just keep a tab on everything in one app.  Focus vs Others: Unlike Gmail which categorises emails into various tabs like Updates, Promotions, Primary, Group or Inbox which turns emails into a list, Outlook sticks to keeping it simple. There is a Focus inbox which has emails from your personal contacts, colleagues. The Others tab has email from Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, your purchases, your bank bill, and pretty much everything under the sun. The good thing about this is that it will keep your main Focus tab looking very clean. The bad bit is that say if you’re waiting for a mail from Amazon about a refund or about a product getting shipped or even waiting to hear from the IT department about your tax returns, it’s all going in one tab. If you subscribe to many sites and get a lot of emails from them, it makes hunting for the few important mails in this Others tab a tedious task. Personally I prefer how Inbox handles emails like this as it bundles them into one coherent group based on the content.    The app also lets you set swiping gestures for each email. You can swipe an email left or right and while this is not a new feature, Outlook lets you choose what each gesture will do. You can set None, Flag, Mark as Read, Delete, Archive, Schedule, Move, etc. What I especially like is that when an email notifications appears in the iPhone and you’re on another app, Outlook also prompts you chose to from the two actions you’ve chosen in the swipe gesture. So if you’ve gotten some annoying email, you can just delete it straight from the notification itself with even the need to open the app. You can however Filter emails, either according to Unread, Flagged or those with File attachments in it. You can also switch off the Focused inbox in the settings of the app. Calendar: The app will automatically sync with your iOS or Google calendar and it’s pretty convenient for those who have a busy schedule in office. It means you can look at your office emails and just move to the calendar tab to see what meetings you have scheduled next and what the agenda will be without having to open too many apps. You can even send meeting requests from within the app itself when you set a new event as well.  A slide-in menu on the left will allow the app to show Holidays in India, Contacts’ Birthday, etc on the calendar as well, which is of course immensely useful in India. Files: The separate tab will showcase whatever files, attachments were mails to you. The best bit is that is syncs with Google Drive and Dropbox as well. So instead of opening another app to send a file link to someone, you can just do it from within the app. You can also instantly hit attach to a document at the bottom of the app when you open the file and mail it to someone else. If you have to send a Google Drive link to someone at Office, you can have both accounts (Google and office) synced in the mail and just send from Outlook.  The app also makes good use of Extensions feature in iOS 8 and will let you share the file you opened in another supporting app if its a PDF. From iBooks to Telegram to Snapchat, the options are quite a few. It’s all very hassle-free and the variety of options makes it much more useful than Gmail, where you have to open a link or attachment in Safari if you want to share it elsewhere. I also felt that Outlook handles attachments faster than the Gmail app. People: This in my opinion is perhaps the weakest feature of the app. The People app shows you all your contacts and you can choose to see the contacts for various email ids together or separately as well. Once again there’s a slide-in menu on the left to help you choose. I felt the app doesn’t really show the most relevant contacts at all times, and finding some people might require that you scroll right down to the bottom. Luckily all contacts have a little compose symbol next to them and you can just hit that to start type straight away. Speed: Unlike Gmail which can often take several minutes for a message to load, or sometimes will prompt me to “switch on” the Gmail account I had uploaded in the app, Outlook felt much faster. It doesn’t take forever for messages to load. Where my official messages are concerned, the app loads them must faster than iPhone’s in-built email client. Conclusion: For a heavy duty user, who is depended on email both for work and personal life, this is a life-saver. I like that you don’t have to switch between apps to manage file sharing, calendar, and email. What I don’t like so much is limited options for organising various kinds of email in the app and the People tab. However even with these two issues, this is now the go-to app for me as far as office email is concerned.