Sparrow for iPhone launched earlier this week and almost all the blogs on the internet burst with posts about it. Even though the default Mail.app could suffice all of your emailing needs, the Sparrow makes the difference with the intuitive interface and also some cool gestures the swim through your email messages. The desktop version of the Sparrow email client has got a considerably huge attention for its minimalist and simple interface with some additional features than the default Mail.app that comes with Mac OS X.
Thousands of apps debut in the App Store almost everyday and there are only a few applications that has the magic in it, and make it to thousands of iOS users the first day. One such app is Sparrow for iPhone. It’s just about 8 years ago Gmail stepped into closed beta and now, Sparrow for iPhone has become its best competitor for Gmail. Here’s our complete review of what Sparrow works for and what it misses.
Why Sparrow?
A while ago, Google released its first native Gmail client for the iPhone and it was a blunder, with huge amount of bugs, that put the company’s QA team under question. And the app was not more than just a wrapper around the regular Gmail Web-app. Even though the default Mail.app had huge improvements to it from iOS5, people have been wanting to get their hands-on with something new, that is well designed, with gestures and other features that makes use of the iPhone well enough. And so did understand the team working for Sparrow for Mac.
Design and UI and Gestures
Sparrow stands out for its design and ease-of-use. So, what do you use a Mail client for? Reading, Replying, Forwarding, Searching and other general tasks, right? But what would you do with your Gmail? You’d probably be managing a lot of labels and other tags, stars and such things. Well, Sparrow does that amazingly well. Just like how we wanted to manage labels in a mail client.
Easy access to almost EVERYTHING
With Sparrow, you could move around with reading and replying to emails with just a swipe or two. The effort to read and reply to mail have considerably reduced. You just need to hold on an email item to mark it read and vice-verse. The UI is more like a deck or cards, placed one below the other and adopts a fairly similar interface the new Facebook app for the iPhone has.The first level give you access to all your email for the account you have selected. Swiping from Left-Right takes you to the second level of menu, which gives you access to labels and mail folders. And performing the action again takes you to the third level of the menu, where all your mail account and application settings are placed.
The Sparrow does not have a sticky navigation bar at the bottom of the app, giving you more space to view and run through your long list of emails. The app also integrates Twitter and Facebook into the emails, and gives thumbnails of your friends’ profile pictures from either Twitter or Facebook.
Navigation and Mail Handling
The Sparrow has re-defined the way emails should work on mobile phones now. With loads and loads of emails flowing into your Inbox, it is pretty essential that our mail client gives us some easy-to-use controls and gestures to manage all the features of your regular email. As I talked about earlier, the navigation is like deck of cards one below the other.
Sparrow handles Gmail pretty well, and supports full label management actions, that the default Mail.app misses. You can swipe a email item from right to left and you are shown a set of options that would let you to add that email item to a label or star it or reply for that mail or even archive or delete the email item.
Everything is a swipe or two away
Handling threads in mails is also very easy with Sparrow. If you want to take a look at a mail thread, then all you need to do is just open a mail from and tap the top bar (center of the top bar) to bring up the threads of that email. The UI is completely amazing even here. The app brings all your important information in one single place, which does not happen in the mobile applications.
Fetching emails got much better with Sparrow, even if it does not support Push notifications for new emails. With a neat and tidy push to refresh idea to fetch new mails, Sparrow stands out as a worthy competitor for the default Mail.app on your iPhone.
Mail Composition and Attachments
This could be another best part of the Sparrow for iPhone. But before I talk about this even more, I wanted to tell you that you will not get the compose screen right after you tap on reply or compose new mail icons on the app. It asks you to add the email recipient instead of taking it directly to the composition screen, which is a bit annoying. Other than this, the compose screen is pretty much we are all used to and there’s no huge change in the screen.
Pretty much like the mail.app, Sparrow allows you to change the mail accounts from which you want to send out emails, add subjects and attachments. Attachments handling has gone to the next step with Sparrow for iPhone. Even though iPhone allows you to add just photos as mail attachments, the app handles them very well. Instead of sending to you the Photo Library to pic a photo and then come back to mail.app and paste them, Sparrow gives you instant access to the photos by opening just a module of the Photo Library and add multiple attachments to your email message. The app also shows you a preview of what photos you have attached and allows you to swipe through the photos by just hiding the keyboard.
There are no rich text formatting for email messages though and the app takes a while to send and receive messages to and from Gmail and Other mail services. I hope this would be improved in the near future.
Handling Multiple Accounts
Unlike the mail.app for the iPhone, Sparrow handles multiple email accounts but its too young to recognize POP emails. The app does not ask for any special configurations and is a complete Gmail companion for the mobile devices. It would be right to compare Sparrow with the Official Gmail for iPhone instead of the mail.app for handling your Gmail accounts. The app can handle Gmail, Google Apps, Hotmail, iCloud, AOL, and many other IMAP services. You will not be able to use Hotmail, Live Mail and MSN, since they are all POP emails.
Sparrow’s major flying point is its Deck of Cards UI
Sparrow’s major flying point is its Deck of Cards UI, which gives almost instant access to any email account you have added in the app. It is quite surprising that they first version of the app is very powerful and can handle multiple emails with ease, and the future seems to be bright for Sparrow on mobile devices.
With the unified mail box and a very fast search algorithm, Sparrow has taken the modern email clients to a spin. There are some lags in search results, but as far as I tested, the search works just fine with the keywords you type in. As Apple said while launching the new iPad back in March, you have to try this in person to get a glimpse of what this app can do.
Bottomline
An email client that we never thought we would want on iPhone
Sparrow has proved that user level apps can be much powerful without compromising the design aspects. The app is very intuitive and we never thought we would want such an email client for the iPhone until we tried Sparrow. The app is a very elegant approach to handle email accounts and emails on the go with genuine gestures and shortcuts to emails.
Despite the design aspects of Sparrow, the app lags in almost all the aspects like Search, Fetching emails and others when compared to the default Mail.app on your iPhone. But still, if you are a professional email user and are under the situation to manage multiple email accounts, then Sparrow would be my recommendation!
On the other hand, if you still rely on Push notifications for your inbox feeds, then Sparrow is not just there. But there are some unofficial tweaks that does so. But until Push comes to Sparrow, I have changed the Mail.app to fetch less emails using Push and whenever an email arrives, I just fire up Sparrow and play with it.