Gadgetory

hey guys its brand am in a min from pocket now calm and this is a comparison of the email experience across these four mobile operating systems so we have the iphone 3gs running on the iphone operating system the HTC hd2 running on Windows Mobile the google nexus one running on android and of course the verizon palm pre plus running on webos we recently did a video comparing these four devices in terms of their home screen experiences and now we're going to take a look at email because i know a lot of people especially myself really rely on a mobile device to bring a very good email experience so that when you're on the go you feel connected you're productive and everything like that so let's go device by device and try to talk about the philosophies behind the various email programs and we're going to start with the iphone ok so here we are with the iphone i'm going to unlock the screen and right off the bat we have no information about any new emails and this is important thing to note because some of the other devices you're going to see do give you information if you have any new email so you don't actually have to unlock the device to start so here we are we're taken to the icon screen as i like to call it and right off the bat we can take a look down at the mail icon and say okay it says three right now in the upper right corner last hour i checked there were two that must mean i have a new email so i think that's really the the best way to be able to check so i'm going to open up the email client the email on the iphone 3gs is very slick and very smooth and very fast i think that's one of the best parts about it so here i've sent myself a test message and within it is a picture pictures show up perfectly i don't have to download them i can pinch to zoom with the very very smooth multi-touch i can move around on the screen does a really good job at supporting HTML emails and really let you see emails as you would on the desktop from here i can mark as unread which is very important i use this function a lot so within the email i can do that although i can't mark as unread from outside in the inbox view to delete i can swipe to the right and I get a little Delete icon which makes it pretty fast too to delete messages but I think you're going to see webos has the best way to delete messages it's super fast so let's say I want to make a new email I press down here one of the greatest things about the email client in the iphone is that when you start typing somebody's name it not only pulls up the names from your address book but also recently entered email addresses so even if there's somebody that isn't in my dress book but I've correspond with them recently it will come up but anyway it's a very very fast way to to to type in the name of someone that you want subject hello and very quick and easy press end and you're done so a very satisfying email client on the iphone 3gs i think thanks a lot because i think thanks hugely in part because it's just very fast and we can go backwards to take a look at our sub folders or if you have multiple accounts they'll show up here that fun does a great job at managing multiple email addresses so that is the iphone 3gs email experience let's take a look at the HTC hd2 now something unique about the hd2 or this is for Windows Mobile in general is that I don't need to unlock the device to see if I've new email I can tap here and see that i have three new emails already and i can slide to the right to go right into my email application but before I do that I want to show you something else unique about the the hd2 I can preview my email right within touchflo 3d and of course this is an HTC enhancement but it's really helpful because I don't have to open my email client I can just dig through my emails through this screen and if I like what I see I can tap on an email I can reply to it or I go straight to my inbox so let's take a look at that test email I sent with the picture and see what it's like to look at the image okay so I need to tap over here to download it I'm over edge so it'll take a second okay and here's the image I can tap on it and there it is and of course I get the nice multi-touch very smooth to here except in this email client there's the extra step of having to actually download the message from the the header of the message there so I can go back to delete a message there are a few ways to do it they make it very easy in Windows Mobile I can tap on a message and hold and press the delete button up there or i can press the delete button down here you can't swipe to delete also another thing i like about the the email client on Mobile is that from the the inbox screen I can mark something as unread which is very handy I don't have to go into the email to mark it as unread and now let's make a new email so quite simply go to menu and new and i'm going to type Brandon and again it pulls from my address book but in this case it won't pull from things that aren't in my dress book and I can type hello again and press the send button and it's off so another thing that I really like about the email client on the HTC hd2 or in Windows Mobile in general is that it has very good integration with microsoft exchange so I can search my company's address book I can search the server for emails that i wrote a year ago it's it's quite remarkable Microsoft devices will always have the best exchange integrations so hd2 is really fantastic email client it's fast probably not as fast as the iphone 3gs just because it's not as refined there are some extra steps to do certain things so let's take a look at the google nexus one and from the unlock screen you don't get any sort of indications of whether you have new emails you can look up here to sort of get an indication but you still need to unlock to see anything else now from here some of the some of the android devices that are made by HTC will actually allow you to have a widget that ties into email kind of give you that touchflo 3d like view of peeking into your email with action without actually having to open the application but on the nexus one we can go right into the email application and here we are and you can see the emails are piling up because I keep sending myself test messages and from here let's open up that test email with the image and over here we have to get it to fetch and it's going to come through pretty fast and just like the last two devices this has multitouch so we can pinch to zoom we can see it in its full glory and it works quite well and so we can press the back button to go to the previous screen to see our message list if we want to delete a message in in the android operating system it's very similar doubt you would do in Windows Mobile you tap on hold then you get the pop up and you can delete so I'm going to press the back button swiping will not do anything in android mark is on red you can also do a tap and hold and go to Marcus on red there so again you don't have to actually go into the message to do mark is on red as you have to do in the iphone so let's make a new message I'm going to press the menu button here and then I'm going to click on compose and let's do what we've been doing all along i'm going to type my name and here we are and i'm going to type you know hello I've been typing lots of hello messages send and there it is a very nice email experience to on the google nexus one there's there's a lot of taps and holds there they don't have menu buttons along the bottom to make it easy to quickly delete a message like you can do on the hd2 or or quickly send a message you always have to dial into this menu system which is okay helps to maximize screen space and finally let's take a look at web OS and here in webos we can see right off the bat that we have an email notification which is great web bless is a really interesting way of showing notifications you can see how many emails you have you can also see the the recent most email that you have so I'm going to drag that up and I'm actually going to go back to the the home screen to kind of show you how webos portrays email so you don't get any sort of notification next to the email icon like you would get on the iphone so you can't glance down and say okay I have three new messages but again web bless is a very interesting way of showing you new email while you're working as to not disrupt you so we're gonna tap right into the email application it will open up a new card which by the way is very convenient because you can keep your email open while listening to pandora radio or while you're on the web or doing anything else and still have the same view stay intact of where you left it when you were doing email last so that's a really good feature of webos and how it relates to email so looking down let's go to that email that I sent myself with the attachment where is it here it is there it is and let's see how webos brings up that image so here it is right here it downloaded the image i can bring it up it doesn't it doesn't it's not included within the email but again we can do pinch to zoom just like we can do with all these other devices they're almost itouch and it's been a smooth very easy to use we can rotate into landscape or at least we should be able to it doesn't look like it's working for me there and then we can copy it into the photo application we can swipe backwards to go backwards that's how webos goes to the previous screen and we've buttons along the bottom that we can use to delete things now I mentioned that webos has the best way to delete emails and this is how you do it you swipe it off the screen the quickest and easiest way that I found yet to delete an email on the iphone operating system you can swipe to the right but then you get a delete button so that's really two steps here in webos it is just one step which is really really quite fantastic now from here you cannot mark items as unread you can't do a tap and hold like you can in windows mobile and in android so you have to go into the into the email to do that sort of thing and I haven't even found a way to to mark an item as unread within an email so here we have reply forward reply all and that's really it i'm sure there's got to be a way to mark as unread but I just haven't found it yet they don't make it very easy to find now to make a new email tweet app the new message button here it opens up a new card and we can start entering information with the slide down keyboard here and so I'm going to do another email to myself and it's searching the global address book it's not as fast as the other devices that we've tested but it's quite good so I'm going to type you know hello got to get used to this keyboard and then I'm going to send it off there and it is gone it says sending email down there on the screen so I'd say that the implementation of email on webos is the least sophisticated of the other operating systems and it's also not as fast even though this is the palm pre plus with an upgraded processor and more ram I still find it to be kind of slow and especially when your multi tasking obviously that's going to use a lot of ram but some of the time i go into my email I've got two or three applications open and it gets really slow so if I were to rate these in terms of best email experience to worst email experience and this is very subjective this really has to do with what I prefer in an email client I'd give the iphone number one because I find it to be the fastest email client that really lets me stay productive I've given 22 the HTC hd2 because it's got perfect exchange integration it's got a really fast email client it lets me preview email and it's also pretty snappy like the iphone 3gs third i will give to android it has a lot of the functionality that Windows Mobile has in the tap and hold to bring up menus you can do a lot from your email inbox without having to dig into the message and I'd give fourth place to webos I just don't think its robust enough it's not nearly as fast as the other cell phone platforms but it generally works especially if you're doing light email so I'm curious to hear what you think about these different email platforms so put a comment in the post on pocket now calm or within the YouTube video and let us know which email client you prefer the best and of course we didn't cover blackberry most people would agree that blackberry is the best email experience but of these four devices and of these four platforms which do you prefer the most that's it for now