In yesterday’s iPhone OS 4 announcement, Steve Jobs revealed seven features, out of the one hundred new features, that were considered to be the most important. The first was multitasking, covered in our blog article published earlier. Another major feature was greatly-improved Mail.
The Mail app on the iPhone has been a sore spot for many users, especially those using their iPhones for business. Many business users have several email accounts that they need to be checking constantly and they need a great Mail app to support them. Currently, many of the complaints were based around not having a unified inbox or only being able to have one Microsoft Exchange account setup at a time.
This all changes with Mail in OS 4. To start, you can now view a Unified Inbox. This means that email messages from all of your mail accounts will be in one single place, instead of having to tap into each inbox individually and check through them all.
Another great option added is Fast Inbox Switching. If you aren’t using the Unified Inbox, you may want to get between all of your inboxes quickly. On the current Mail app, this can take quite a few taps depending on how many accounts you have. I personally only have three mail accounts, but it still takes a while to get in and out of each when checking all my mail. I am anxiously awaiting this feature.
You can also now add more than one Microsoft Exchange account. Microsoft Exchange is a very heavily used enterprise server, so compatibility and flexibility there are important to the iPhone working for everybody.
Similar to the OSX Mail application, Mail on the iPhone can now organize messages by thread, allowing you to easily see only messages in a certain conversation. This comes in handy when you have a very full inbox and want to flip through the emails only relevant to the one you’re reading.
The last noted feature of the new Mail app is that it can open attachments in a third-party app. This opens up quite a few possibilities for being able to open previously “foreign” attachments into any app that supports them on your iPhone.
While the Mail app has had quite a few options from the start, Apple continues to pave the way in adding features. iPhone OS 4 seems to be answering many requests and turning into a very solid platform for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
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