Who’d have thought email would suddenly be the hot app startups were going after, but that appears to be what’s happening. And it’s being driven both by a desire to make email ‘work’ better and by the rise of the touch interface. Consider, if you will, the hype around the new “Mailbox” app from developer Orchestra which is aiming to turn a streamlined Gmail client into an uber to-do list. It’s winning some plaudits from some quarters, though not so much from others.
But the other angle which is being explored is the rich new area of the touch interface. Thus it is that there’s a new kid on the block in the shape of Incredimail for the iPad, which has been been out before but today is released in a new version.
This has a crack at redesigning the inbox, unifies multiple email accounts and creates a photo inbox from incoming email and Facebook photos. The market these guys are aiming for is very mainstream. In fact you could say this is a email re-imagined for users more used to using Flipboard and scrolling though photos of the kids.
You literally swipe through your email in a very easy way. You could easily see an older person taking to this app far more than the “list” approach which has simply been ported from the desktop experience.
Josef Mandelbaum, CEO of Perion calls this a “unified messaging application”. Whatever you call it, it does make email look pretty damn good on the iPad, and an Android version is coming.
The crucial points to note are that it has a very nice preview feature which is built for touch – just slide your finger over the email and there it is. It also has a built in Web Browser so you don’t have to open Safari, and integration with platforms like Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn, and Picasa Web, Flickr and Instagram.
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All in all it’s a great looking app which is the kind of app you might download onto the iPad of a non-technical relative who likes to see pictures of the grandchildren and deal with low levels of email.
