Matt’s top 5 reasons iPhone email needs help
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Rumors are flying about what iPhone OS 4 has in store… and according to the TiP poll, the biggest desire for the new OS from our readers is multitasking.
Granted, I can see the appeal of true multitasking. I totally dig why everyone is clamoring for this. That being said, the one area that I would really love to see the iPhone improve is email.
“But Matt,” you say. “The iPhone already does email. I can send emails and read them, and even attach pictures to them!”
I don’t disagree. The iPhone does a decent job with regards to email, but (especially compared to the BlackBerry), it’s really lacking in a lot of ways. I know it’s no big shock that the BlackBerry lives and dies by email, and everything else is a second thought. But the iPhone is the exact opposite – it’s a device for entertainment and web browsing, with email as a “nice to have.”
I switched to the iPhone last summer, after YEARS of being a “Crackberry” addict. In just about every way, I have become totally drunk on the iPhone Kool-Aid, and I love my 3Gs much more than I did my BlackBerry Bold.
Except email. Here’s why this aspect of the iPhone is a totally second-class citizen:
1) No visual notifications: There is no way to determine, visually, that I have received new email without actually unlocking my iPhone. Yes, I can tell I have received a new email via an audio tone, but if my phone is on silent, the only method for discovering a new message has arrived is my “swiping to unlock,” and then entering my passcode (my iPhone is locked for security reasons). I realize that without a hardware change, a new iPhone OS won’t add an external LED for notifications, but I still feel justified in complaining about this.
2) Three words: no universal inbox. The iPhone lets me add a multitude of mailboxes to check (for example, I receive both my “corporate” work email on my iPhone as well as my personal Gmail). However, there is no single view of all my messages. Switching between reading personal email and “work” email requires backing ALL the way out of one mailbox and then drilling into the other. In my ideal world, there would be ONE view that shows ALL messages, regardless of mailbox, or even regardless of folder (more on that below), and would be intelligent enough to know which mailbox the message belonged to, so that replying to a “work” message would come from my work email address, etc.
3) Poor handling of email folders. And by “poor” I mean “not at all.” I am a big user of labels in Gmail for organizing my messages, and have a ton of rules that funnel emails into various labels (which are like folders). However, the iPhone only checks my Inbox. In order to see new messages that were pushed into a label, I have to check the “All Mail” mailbox manually. It’s a little easier with my Exchange email, as you can configure ActiveSync to check specific folders in addition to the Inbox, but it’s not much better. Plus, the “All Mail” mailbox includes my outgoing messages as well, which makes it cumbersome to view.
4) No custom audio alerts. There’s no way (without jailbreaking) to have the iPhone send different message tones depending on message subject or sender. All email is considered equal. Granted, the BlackBerry doesn’t quite do this out of the box (although certain emails can be identified as a “Level One” message, which can have a different tone). This is a big fail for people who use their phone as a pager, and need to be alerted differently for critical emails.
5) One signature to rule them all? Nope. The iPhone allows a setting to append a signature to outgoing messages, but this same signature is used for ALL mailboxes. Which is a poor solution, as I would have a very different signature for my work email address than for my personal one. My solution is to use NO signature… which is not really a solution at all.
With the exception of item #1, all of these issues can be solved with updates to the iPhone OS. And item #1 has a software workaround — displaying a count of unread emails on the unlock screen would be a huge improvement (this is available via various apps today, but requires jailbreaking). I have no evidence that Apple plans on making these types of improvements to email available in iPhone OS 4, but I still am hopeful for at least SOME improvement to email handling, which will make the iPhone a much more capable tool for professional and enterprise users.
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Thumbnail photo via Mark Kelly under a Creative Commons license
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EDITOR’S UPDATE: Matt, got some good news for you, buddy. Looks like an integrated inbox might just be in the works for us after all. Let’s cross our fingers on the other stuff!
My problem isn't so much with a unified inbox (to me it seems like that would just create more work and more confusion ) but with the notifications. The best setup I've found is with a blackberry. You can display each mail account as a different icon, and each of these icons has a unread email count (which is useless to me too, because I can't read all my emails on my phone, there too many) and most recently a red star for new emails. Basically, if emails have come in since the last time you've looked at that inbox, a big red start will tell you that something new has arrived, and which account its gone into. Unread email counts are only useful if you remember that there were 20 before, and now there are more ( 341 and then 342) Does anyone know how to make an iphone do that?
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