Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brian a minimun from pocketnow.com and in this video we're going to talk about the email experience on Windows Phone 7 and compare it to Android and to the iPhone let's get started now before continuing it's important to mention that the Windows Phone 7 hardware and software you're about to see is not final it is not a representation of what you're going to be able to get when devices start shipping in quarter 4 we're doing this for fun so you can get an idea of how the experience is today so let's talk about email on all three devices I have my Microsoft Exchange account being synchronized so that all emails across all three devices are the same and even the read and unread states are synchronized now what's really important for email on a mobile device is triage you want to be able to quickly and easily multi select items mark them as unread don't need a couple action on a few so that when you get back to your desktop or your main screen you have pretty much eliminated off the clutter and you get down to the things that you need a big screen for okay so let's talk about how these three devices handle email triage so on Android depending on which Android device you're using you get checkboxes on the Left which conveniently allow you to check them and action on multiple emails and we've three options mark is unread add star or delete I'm going to mark them as unread and then I have to go back and actually uncheck them now in Windows Phone 7 it's very similar and it works quite well in fact there's a twist that is I think better what you can actually do is tap to the left of the message and the check boxes automatically come up and from here you can actually do more than just mark as read or unread or delete or add start you can set flag you can complete it you can clear the flag you can move it and delete it so from here I'm going to mark as unread and they are as marked as unread although it's kind of hard to tell sometimes which messages are our read marked as read and marked as unread in this version of Windows Phone 7 and over here on the iPhone there's no way to multi select to get the mark as unread to show up so we can go to edit and then we can multi-select but we can only delete and move that's it if you want to go into an email and market as unread you have to actually go into the email select it and come back out and do that for every email that you want to mark as unread so Windows Phone 7 has a great way to manage multiple emails as does Android so let's talk about the display of email in iPhone you can choose to have an email preview if you'd like and so we have the name of the sender plus the subject and the time but you can also pull in the first two lines of the email Windows Phone 7 you don't get a choice but by default the way it comes out of the box is you get the name of the sender the subject and the first sentence and the time which is good enough and over here in Android depending on the Android device you're using it's much like the iPhone how I have it displayed over here with the sender the subject the time and you can also star or unstart certain items now in Windows Phone 7 there are multiple views for your messages you can swipe to the right to get only your unread messages swipe to the right again for flagged urgent and back to off can't do that on iPhone or Android so a really great way to organize your email now let's talk about how emails actually display HTML emails so here we have a CompUSA newsletter yes CompUSA still exists sort of and we can pull it up on both devices it displays very nicely in the iPhone very nicely here on Android although it's not as scaled back and perhaps move that around side scroll on Windows Phone 7 for some reason this bill does not support HTML email which is a big problem because there's a lot of email that I think most people get that is HTML these days so no HTML email support in this version of Windows Phone 7 that is not to say that when it ships it will be missing as well so let's go back here back and back now let's talk about creating a new email message which is obviously another important component of an email program on a mobile device so down here for each iPhone we tap on the new message button here we press the plus and over here we go in to compose okay very similar workflows on all those devices I'm going to type my name and we're gonna see how fast it looks into the contact database to pull out my name if I can spell my name right okay very fast on the iPhone very fast on Windows Phone 7 and I expect that here on Android 2.2 it'll be just as fast and it is now from here we can do a few different things on all of these devices on the iPhone you really have only two choices you can cancel and it allow you to save it as a draft or delete the draft or you can send it to options Windows Phone 7 you have a lot more options if I tap here to open the application tray I can change the priority add add a blind carbon copy or carbon copy receiver or I can actually attach a picture which is quite nice I don't see any way to attach a file which would be great on the iPhone of course if you want to email picture you have to start in the photo gallery and then go into the email application so let's say I want to email this picture here it's attached boom instantly and in Android you can also attach a picture so you click add attachment you go into the gallery you can actually go into the file browser in that case and I don't have any pictures here to attach so also in here in Windows Phone 7 if you press the close button it asks you do you want to save it as a draft cancel or save the message and here in in in Android if you want to save it as a draft you click this button here you click save as draft it's an extra step and then it goes into your drafts folder so let's go back to the Inbox views of all of these different all these different email applications now something that is kind of a drag is that in this version of Windows Phone 7 there's no way to view a unified inbox which I think a lot of people will be disappointed about but once again this is beta software it's possible that when Windows Phone 7 comes out they will have the unified inbox feature Android 2.2 and iPhone 4 or os 4 do do unified inbox quite well by now so obviously email is a critical function of any smartphone and so far Windows Phone 7 seems to be on the right track it allows you to triage email very efficiently by allowing you to multi select and act on many emails at a time with a lot of different methods it allows you to quickly filter out between unread messages so your wasting time digging through your list of read and unread trying to find your unread and it also is fast it has this fluid Metro interface that is a refreshing deviation of what you get from some of the heavier email clients and yes it does work in landscape although strangely when you tap the the ass the tray over here it takes up so much of the screen there are some weaknesses like lack of unified inbox and lack of HTML support but again this is not final software we have to reserve judgment until we see a shipping device of Windows Phone 7 in this fall so hope you enjoyed this video if you liked it give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel for more smart phone videos thanks for watching and that's it for now