After acquiring email startup Acompli for $200 million in December last year, Microsoft had launched Outlook for iOS and Android in January this year. The following month saw the Redmond giant acquiring the calendar startup Sunrise.
Microsoft has today revamped its Outlook app for the aforementioned mobile OSes and announced that Sunrise will eventually be shutting down. The new revamped app is largely the effort of Accompli and Sunrise, bringing them to be part of the bigger Outlook team. The iOS version of the app has started rolling out today and the Android version will be available “beginning in early November.”
Microsoft has also announced that Outlook now has almost 30 million mobile active users, 1 in 5 of those are connecting more than one account, and the apps see 1.2 billion sessions per month.
For iOS, Outlook has gotten a very welcome redesign. Your email, calendar, people and files are now put front and center. Event invitations are clearly shown in the message list and the event icon allows you to identify events easily at a glance. The flag and attachment icons are made to look more like on Windows, bringing them to the right side of the message list. Pressing the Mail navigation button takes you back to the top of your Inbox. Easier access has been given to the attachment option while sending new mail.
You also get visual tweaks in the Calendar navigation icon. This include dynamic movement while you’re scrolling through your calendar to help you visualize how far away from today you are.
In short, the UI has been tweaked to give you easy access to things that matter and provide more emphasis on them.
The Android version for Outlook has also gotten a sweet update. The new revamped app borrows a lot from the traditional Material design for Android. Almost all aspects of the app, including the header, message list, and compose experiences, have been redesigned. The functions such as event details, the People list, and contact details have all got a new Material look.
The Calendar Agenda view has also gotten a revamp with more information about your events. You also get many design updates and UI changes throughout the whole app.
Microsoft is also promising a better integration of the Sunrise Calendar’s features into their Outlook app “over the coming months.” The Redmond giant is promising “Interesting Calendars and connections to your favorite apps and services” as well as “improvements to Outlook’s ability to create meetings while on the go and handle meetings across time zones.”
The company has also said that the Sunrise app will eventually be discontinued until its features are fully integrated into Outlook.
And while iOS and Android users get to enjoy all these features, Microsoft’s very own Windows Phone users will apparently have to wait awhile longer. The tech giant hasn’t yet announced a specific date for porting these features to Windows Phone, merely stating that they will be out soon.
