For those of you on this planet who use an iPhone of some sort, or an iPod touch, how often do you use it for email? Do you find yourself using the built in email app just to read emails, or do you have a separate, dedicated device for email like a Blackberry? How many of you actually use it as your full time mobile email solution?
I've recently discovered that the majority members of the iPhone user group in Indonesia are also avid Blackberry users.
User groups in Indonesia are still primarily based on mailing lists thanks to the proliferation of slow and unreliable Internet connection until just recently. The influx and growth of gray market Blackberries lend further support and lifeline to the use of mailing lists whereas in more developed parts of the world mailing lists are on the way out being replaced by message boards or forums.
Blackberries, coupled with affordable unlimited data plan make the perfect email and chat devices, so much so that they are not primarily considered as business tools in this part of the world. They have become core communications tool among the haves and the upper range of the middle class.
I find this trend of dual smartphone ownership rather intriguing I ended up doing an entire podcast episode on this very topic but that is not what this piece is about.
This is about the capability of Apple's mobile Mail program.
iPhones and iPod touches have a workable email program. It's far from perfect but it does the job.
Mail app in the iPhone OS lets you set up accounts from various providers such as Apple's own MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, a Microsoft exchange account, or from your own domain or ISP. With certain email providers, it lets you get your emails via the push method like in a Blackberry. With others, you can set Mail to fetch your emails every time you load that account.
Now to cut to the chase, here are reasons why I think Apple's mobile Mail app is not ready for prime time yet.
1. No mark as flagged
Often you get emails with instructions, alerts or notices or just the ones you need to reread more carefully later. These are the kinds you'd want to keep and make sure you read again in the near future. Without a flag, it's easy to miss them.
2. No mark as read
Mobile Mail, just like its desktop sibling, shows you how many unread messages you have via a red badge on its application icon. Having this displayed would often ring a bell in your head as if saying "C'mon read me, go ahead, I dare ya."
3. No search
Perhaps for a good reason. Mobile mail can only display a limited number of messages at any one time. Newer messages will push oldest ones out of the list. The maximum number of emails shown is 200. A search that goes back only 200 messages may be not so effective although it will still be useful up to a point.
4. No attachment
Well this point is not entirely true. Mail does support receiving and previewing the most common types of attachments such as microsoft office documents, images, sounds, and PDF files. However to this point Mail does not allow sending an attachment of any kind except pictures stored in the photo library. If you have a PDF of any kind or documents stored using a third party file storage application, you can't attach them to emails. Apple currently doesn't allow this feature to be implemented. Even text files made using a writing app are sent as the body text of the email, not as attachments.
5. Limited storage
Mail only allows displaying up to 200 emails as the older ones are removed from the phone's database. This sort of forces people to use IMAP service to keep their emails up to date although this is actually a good thing. What's not good is if you're the type of person who rely a lot on emails, being limited to 200 emails at a time may just restrict your communications.
These are some of the reasons why I've switched my emailing activities on my iPhone from Mail to Gmail mobile. It solves all but one of the five issues above while giving me Gmail's threaded view which is in my opinion the best way to keep things in context.
Until Apple solves or provides a workaround for those problems, the Mail app does not present itself as a compelling email application. Usable but not enough for a full time email client.
