Microsoft releases Outlook Preview app for Android, and it’s awesome
If you’re like me – tethered to an inescapable Exchange account for work – you’ve probably been less than thrilled with Android’s built-in support for Exchange accounts. Email conversations can get clunky, since the built-in email client doesn’t group conversations together properly – not even when adding your Exchange account to Gmail! For some reason, the appointment/meeting response feature has also never worked properly for me, either. There’s no way to quickly archive messages, and moving them to folders manually takes way too many taps … I could go on.
Luckily, Microsoft has just released a new Outlook app for Android that I’ve been playing around with all morning. This is an official version of Outlook by Microsoft for Android, and it’s currently in an open preview (although it seems pretty stable to me). So far, it’s working much better than the built-in Exchange client for Android. Here’s what I really like:
- The swipe to archive feature
- The fact that it properly groups conversation threads together
- The file and contact manager
- The overall design – it looks really nice, and makes me not want to go back to Gmail for my Exchange account at all.
Granted, it’s missing some basic features, like the ability to change the colors in your calendar. It also doesn’t integrate the calendar into Android’s default Calendar app, either – this is needed for me, since I use my Google Calendar for personal appointments, and my Exchange calendar for business. I need both of these calendars integrated together, and there’s no way to do that if you switch over to the Exchange app completely.
But for now, I’m going with it – and I like it a lot. If you want to try it out, click the link below.
Download: Google Play
