Inboxmind Blog Apple Watch Email App Review: By InboxMind

Overall Conclusion: You may buy Apple Watch for many other good reasons (fitness, sending your heart beat signature to someone, etc.), but if you are looking to get more Email Productivity - you may have to slightly lower your expectations for now.Review:Important disclosure: InboxMind, our company folks who are having a bit too much fun writing this blog have their own iPhone/iPad Email App available for sale on the Apple Store. It is not hard to imagine that we may be thinking about Apple Watch Email App. So please read this review with a pinch of salt. Most of the times, we are on the other end of the product reviews. We do respect and appreciate all the hard work Apple's designers and engineers have put into this. And let us begin by stating that..By all means, Apple Watch is a great piece of engineering and art!Apple finally launched its well anticipated iWatch yesterday. Well technically it is called Apple Watch, not iWatch. This is perhaps an important clue that Apple is eventually looking at Watch as a dominant but "independent" product category in the long term, and therefore not just an extension of iPhones and iPads.For potential customers it means good news because the wearable devices require a different set of UI/UX, technology and applications. So if you are looking to invest in a Smartwatch - Apple Watch may be a good long term investment. You can expect rapid Watch OS updates (it is not iOS), improvements and next gen wearable apps that leverage LED and touch sensors, blue tooth sync and 'sensory' alerts (Apple calls it a fancy technical term: "Taptic Engine" creating "Haptic Feedback", which is an actuator synced with audio)InboxMind shared some predictions on the Email App experience few hours before the launch, and not to be patting ourselves on the back but it seems the launch pretty much confirmed our analysis (see below).Well now, that the dust has officially settled - we have the opportunity to analyze more information. We will be sharing more information as we go. Here are some of the key points (also read below):Email App UI/UX: Mainly a notification device. From your Apple Watch, you can select to open the email on your paired iPhone. Now there are some ways to respond using SIRI (voice, voice converted to text) or send sensory signals (smiley sign, heart rate, certain type of taps, etc.) - but if you are looking to respond to a business email I don't think your customer or boss will appreciate receiving your sensations. The text size is readable, but I think it is unrealistic to read more than a couple of words from subject line or scrolling through the body content..Remember, folks who type you the whole message in the subject line itself ( I am like that too), well I guess we have to adapt if you choose to buy the Watch!Email Action Buttons: The good news is that even if you can not respond, and but if somehow you can still read the message - you can mark it for Action, Delete it or mark it Unread. This pehaps may be one of the most useful features, although the real-esate for "Mark It Unread" may be used for something better. Well, you can tell us what you like and we will make sure to consider that in our Apple Watch App ;-)Work-in-progress: We apologize for any typos etc. in the above draft. We have to momentarily leave and work on our own app. But we will soon return to finish this blog or perhaps keep it is a living evolving blog. If you liked the analysis and if it really added some value in your decision making, please come back to read it. Follow us on Twitter (@inbox_mind) so we can let you when the blog is updated and/or finished. Cheers!Apple Watch Pre-Launch Analysis:source used for anaysis: a brief previeiw of email app shown in the USA Today Pre-Launch Apple Watch Video (publicly available)Key Highlights of iWatch Email Experience:Requires iPhone paired and working (good to have extra battery for your iPhone)Familiar user interface extends iPhone experience (mirrors iPhone UX) Digital crown for launching email app, good for fat fingers and avoiding false positive (watch screen is susceptable to accidental touching)Text easy to read and suited for small screen sizeThree most used action buttons: Mark Unread, Flag, TrashSome other interesting areas we will be further looking into:iWatch seems to be purely an Email Reading device. Don't see any Reply button? How does it let users view only the high priority emails, especially for those users who get hundreds of email every day? How can users customize email notifications to only see notifications for important emails? What type of iWatch specific sensory notifications are linked with the iWatch Email UI (for example: visual, audio, vibration alerts)How does it sync with iPhone settings related to Privacy?In conclusion, it seems like a great first step ! At InboxMind, we wish all the best to Apple iWatch product designers, engineers and marketeres for their launch today!