Gadgetory

no hey this is Thomas Houston with the verge and we're taking a look at Sparrow for iOS Sparrow takes some of the design ideas from Facebook specifically the the idea of using cards and moving back and forth and takes it a little bit further so you can swipe left once and you can dig down into whatever account you're in swipe left again and see all of your accounts and if you're all the way up at the top you can just tap the top left and it pulls you all the way back to see all of your different accounts but then if you want to jump into a specific account you can just hop in and pull up all your specific labels in one place it takes a little bit of time to get used to but ultimately it's a it's a really efficient and fast way to navigate your inbox definitely faster than Apple's mail the great thing here is that you've got a unified inbox so you can have 1015 however many accounts you won it's got a little bit of a higher information density than male primarily because they pull out the bottom navigation bar and in this place is just a compose button so from within any inbox you can just tap the bottom right and it pulls up all your contacts it is odd that spareth throws up a screen that forces you do pick your recipients before moving on to the rest of your email so you can't start writing and you can't start working on the subject until you actually pick who it is so anyway all I know myself it's you know it's pretty much like any other email app one of the nice things is you can just tap the top and swit switch the account that you want to send from unfortunately there isn't a rich text editing here like you'll find in the actual mail app but a little something it's not really a big loss one of the really great things that Sparrow does have is you can add attachments after the fact so where as with mail you have to jump into your photos app in order to add the photo to an email you can add it here even better you can go in and add multiple photos to any email spare gives you the option to shrink those down at the end of being very large one of the cool things that Sparrow has in the general reading view is you can tap the inbox title and it'll move you between different sections so you can tap it and you can move to all of your unread and if you're in the unified inbox this looks at all the unread across all of your different email accounts and then you can also tap it again and pull in all of your starred emails so Sparrow much like on the desktop app supports most map services you know you can use Gmail you can use google apps you can use iCloud there's AOL support and mobileme and yahoo unfortunately there's not pop support yet but we've heard is coming you'll see that just like on the desktop app there's facebook integration and so what that does is it pulls in user photos so you have a little bit better of an idea of who is actually sending you an email it's pretty hard to escape a giant email thread in the modern office and spares done a really good job of dealing with that and so one of the first things you can do is you can swipe up and down between different threads so that's pretty handy the other great thing is you can tap the title and you can see all of the responses in the thread with the author and a quick preview and then jump into any of them really quickly it's a really subtle really interesting UI that we're not seeing anywhere else and it really makes dealing with long email threads much easier so one of the great things that you can do you can just swipe right on on any message and you can label it you can start you can reply from directly within here where you can archive or delete so it's not like the mail app where you're forced to either you know trash it or archive it you're given both options so if you want to label it you can just tap the label button and then add it very quickly and so it's no longer a question of moving it between different folders that sort of sync up to gmail but it's not always perfect so it's really really fast and it makes moving through your inbox very easy unfortunately there's no way an appt browser yet so if you do find a link within an email it's going to take you back to mobile safari we have heard that it's coming in later versions so it's you know it's not too big of a problem unlike on the desktop you're not able to specify the email client that you want to use and so it's pretty much impossible to go fully sparrow and use it all the time for absolutely everything because if you're if you're emailing from any other app it's going to default to the mail app so the gold standard for mobile email search is still gmail on Android mail lags far behind it's it's just not as fast and it it tends not to pull up the actual results or any results that are as good the bulk editing abilities are pretty nice as well so you can just tap the edit button fortunately there's a mark all is red you know which we're really not seeing anywhere else what you can also do is select multiple emails and you can move all of them or archive you know just select ones or delete all of them or just select emails we've been using the app for the past month or so and we've come to see it is the best mail app for iOS unfortunately though when it launches very soon it is going to be launching without push and so if you're dependent on that it's a bit of a deal breaker and you're still going to have to use the primary mail app until sparrow launches with push notifications that aab simply shows the promise of what a mail app on iOS could be