Prior to the mobile-first mindset that a lot of us have today, Microsoft Outlook was the preferred way for many us to manage our email. And calendar. And contacts. Well, you get the point. Heck, it’s still the main way a lot of users get their corporate/Exchange work done. As some of you  may know, Microsoft recently launched an Android app that delivers its unified approach to your handheld device.
They say:
Outlook is a free email app that helps you get more done from anywhere with one unified view of your email, calendar, contacts, and attachments. Outlook automatically surfaces your most important messages – across all your email accounts. Swipe to quickly delete, archive, or schedule messages you want to handle later. Easily view your calendar, share available times, and schedule meetings. And attach files from your email, OneDrive, or Dropbox with just a few taps.
Outlook works with Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com (including Hotmail, MSN), Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and iCloud.
We say:
When it comes to Exchange support, it’s really hard to argue against Microsoft’s own approach. Thanks to the integration of other cloud services, and Android’s built-in sharing features, we’re able to efficiently manage our emails and appointments. If you’re in the hunt for a different approach to handling your Gmail account we say give this one a whirl.
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Correction: it doesn’t have Contacts yet. What you get is a list of people you have recently communicated by email and not your full contact list.
Contacts? I’m pretty sure Outlook just keeps a list of the people you’ve sent emails to right from when you started using it. Apart from that, though, all the other features are solid. Outlook is one thing that Microsoft is definitely doing right.
Here it is April and they still do not have contacts working and integrated with android. You get a list in the app, mostly of people from your outlook.com “People” section but it does not integrate with the android Contacts app/dialer and so it is of little use. If you previously depended on your contacts from the old outook app being in the android contacts you will be sorely disappointed with this app. And since they removed the old outook app from the play store, it appears I am out of luck until they decide to add the feature back. I sometimes wonder if any of the developers designing these ever actually use any of the features. Something like this seems so backward to remove a basic functionality that was previously there.