There's no question Microsoft is doing some superb work on Apple's iOS, Macs, and now also Apple Watch. There's also no question it's still Microsoft. The new version of
Microsoft Outlook 1.3.5 for iOS includes a tremendous Apple Watch app, with a feature list that is greatly superior to Apple's own Mail on the Watch. Since you don't have to have an Outlook email account to use this app, and since you can connect your regular iCloud one to it, it should be great. Except that, yet again, Microsoft has a long list of features -- and while this time they kind of work, they also kind of don't. If you went through a bullet point presentation about the features, you'd say they work, but if you actually go to use them, you wouldn't.
Outlook 1.3.5 is a nicely-designed Apple Watch app in so many ways: for example how it has a useful Glance showing latest emails. We're not at all keen, though, that you don't have any unread emails, it just says "Have a nice day," but that is at least better than the completely black and blank screen we've seen other Glances do.
In the mail app -- which, curiously, has a reversed-out icon so that it's a blue Outlook logo on a white background, and is therefore oddly difficult to spot -- you get your latest unread emails and your next Calendar appointment. Specifically, it's the latest unread emails in Outlook's "focused inbox": that is to say your main mailbox, which contains all emails that Outlook thinks are genuinely important. Outlook does a good job of separating out the wheat from the chaff; for example, newsletters go off into other mailboxes automatically.
However, it's significant that what you see are
unread messages. Once you've read it, it's gone from the Watch. We've found it a bit of a chore sometimes, in that Apple's own Mail on the Watch retains a notification of recent messages until you force-touch the screen, and choose to clear those notifications. Yet it turns out to be more useful than Outlook's approach, because at least you can go back to your mail knowing that the email you were just interrupted reading is still there.
When you're reading the mail, the Outlook Watch app works well, and there's an interesting duplication of controls. At the foot of every email you get options to delete, reply, and so on, but four of those controls are also available when you force touch at any point. It's fair enough that Microsoft had to make a call about which four to fit in there, but it's odd that it chose not to include Reply. Instead you get Schedule, Archive, Delete, or Mark as Unread.
There isn't actually a Reply on this Watch app, there is only a Reply to All at the foot of the message. We'd prefer it be Reply, and we'd rather have the option: perhaps Microsoft could've put Reply to All in the message, and just Reply in force touch. It is a great thing that you can reply via your Watch, though, really excellent; you can't do that with Apple's own Mail. On Outlook, you can dictate a reply via Siri, or you can do much the same thing Apple does with text messages: tap on one of a selection of predefined responses. Unfortunately, the reason this isn't exactly the same thing Apple does is that Microsoft won't let you edit those responses, whereas Apple does.
Something that potentially makes Outlook more useful than Apple Mail on the Watch is that schedule function: tap on a message to have it vanish and return to your inbox tomorrow, tonight, at a specific time, and so on. That may or may not sound good to you: it is indeed burying your head in the sand and pretending an email didn't come through, but it's a very good piece of burying your head. It honestly does lift a weight off your shoulders. Whether you see the benefit or would never use it yourself, though, it is a clear difference between this and Apple Mail.
So far, however, it's a good idea only in theory. In practice, it is absurdly finicky to set up the first time, and thereafter not terribly satisfying.
Part of the problem is that you
do have to set it up: you can't set it up on your Watch, and there is no apparent way to set it up on your iPhone, either. There is, but we couldn't find it without help from Microsoft support. What we did find was that if you get an email on your iPhone, and you press the Schedule button, the iOS app asks if you want to create a schedule folder. You can't know this, and the question does not even hint at it, but the schedule folder is a mailbox that Outlook moves your scheduled emails into. If you say no, you don't want to create this folder you didn't ask for and have no clue about, you cannot schedule an email.
You're smart, you'll figure it out, and go through the process again to say yes, but you'll say it with a huge exasperated sigh. Get used to that sigh. Having done this on your iPhone, and having tested that it works, you now know that pressing the Schedule button pops up a question asking when you want this email to reappear. The choices are in a few hours, this evening, tomorrow morning, or your own pick of a time.
Open an email on your Apple Watch and press the Schedule button, however, and you don't get a question. You don't get any choice, the email just goes away, presumably to reappear at some time. If it's the case that there is a default time, and Microsoft doesn't let you change that, well, okay, there's probably a reason -- but there is also no possible way to tell what that default time even is. Worse -- much worse -- the first time you try this, you may find that the message doesn't get scheduled, it just vanishes.
Emails that you schedule to reappear
should be temporarily moved to the Scheduled folder you created. This is what was happening to anything we tested on the iPhone, but on Apple Watch, messages just disappeared -- and they did not end up in that Scheduled folder, or any other that we can find.
Microsoft Support explained that this is because we hadn't created or nominated a schedule folder. Unexpectedly, they were right, too. On the iPhone, we found our way to Advanced Settings, where it told us that we hadn't created or nominated a schedule folder. Handily, it lists a series of folders you might want to nominate to be the schedule folder, and in our case, there was the one called Scheduled that our iPhone had created earlier.
We tapped on it again, to nominate the folder Outlook had created and named Scheduled, as the folder which we wanted to move Scheduled messages. You're following this, right? After that, it worked on the Apple Watch: we can now schedule a message, and it will temporarily sit in that folder, where we can grab it if we've made a mistake, or changed our mind. Otherwise, the email will come back to us at some point -- but we still can't say when, nor find any clue whatsoever about what time that reappearance will be.
At least you get the option to retrieve that email by going back to your iPhone. In our testing, we couldn't fathom how to tell Outlook we no longer wanted that email scheduled, that we wanted to deal with it now -- but we could read the email, and therefore respond to it.
Calendar
On the surface, the Calendar is another excellent part of Outlook for Apple Watch: in a genuinely well-done front screen display, you get your latest unread emails at the top, and your next calendar appointments at the bottom. One look tells you all you need to know, and you can tap to go in for more details.
Unfortunately, if you do go into a Calendar event on Outlook for Apple Watch, then you also get a Cancel button. For more than 30 years, Cancel has been the button to get you out of a dialog box without accidentally having changed some setting. Today, on this app, it means cancel the event. Cancel, delete, remove, take it off the calendar -- and with no way we can see to Undo that. We'd obviously prefer that the button was labelled Delete, but Cancel Event would do as well.
You want to like Outlook for Apple Watch. Microsoft has always come across to us as if it thought design were some veneer you got somebody to add on later, and in so many, many ways it feels as if that attitude is changing. Design is not the color scheme, design is how the thing works for you, and much of the new Apple Watch version of Outlook is good. Yet it scores over Apple Mail with this scheduling feature, except you can't actually use that. It scores over Apple Mail in the design and detail of the Calendar, except you are likely to delete events in it.
Microsoft Outlook 1.3.5 for Apple Watch requires watchOS 1.0 or higher, running on an Apple Watch, plus an iPhone running iOS 8.0 or later, and is free in the App Store.
Who is Microsoft Outlook on the Apple Watch for:
If you are wedded to Outlook, then this is better than trying to shoehorn it into Apple's Mail system.
Who is Microsoft Outlook on the Apple Watch not for:
If you're the opposite, and live in Apple Mail, there is little advantage to you in getting Outlook -- though we love how you can reply from Outlook on your Watch.
--William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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