Dear Inbox, how do I love thee? Let me enumerate the ways.
You're Incredibly Social
Inbox presents your email in social media style. It changes your email from a boring monotonous list, to a preview of people, attachments, and message types. I never realized before how wrong the chronological view is for message listing. This social media view is much more conversational, relevant, and let me just say that yes, it is very pretty.How You Handle My Attachment
Inbox, I have an unhealthy attachment to you because of the way you handle attachments. Attachments are a pain, aren't they? And forget trying to find a particular one in a message. With Inbox, all attachments are shown upfront in a compact, easy scrolling list. This includes not just images, but previews of links in messages, and audio files shown in Facebook style. It also doesn't seem to show those annoying signature file attachments...which is ALWAYS annoying.The Way You Bundle Me Up
Bundles group messages that are alike together. There are a lot of default bundles such as promotions, notifications, purchases. These are moderately useful, and by default, they are set to not trigger a phone alert when a message of these types come in. Which...is awesome. Bundles are good for organization of messages, but their most powerful use is deciding which messages alert you, and which don't. My most spammy offenders, people and school who send several trivial emails a day, now get custom bundles, and that bundle no longer chirps for my attention with notifications, pulling me away from work.An Archive By Any Other Name
I have always been angered by Gmail's archive feature and its insistence on being used. Swiping actions would result in archiving instead of something more useful, and then I never could find my message if it was accidentally archived. It's one of the 2 main reasons I have always felt Gmail to be inferior to all other email. However, marking an email as "Done" in Inbox makes sense to me, and it's essentially the archive feature. Making the "Done" list easily accessible, combined with bundling, makes me feel confident I can find that "Done" email again if I need to. The purpose of marking a message as such is to help achieve a concept called Inbox Zero. This concept was not invented by Google, but it now seems possible to have my inbox stay empty except for only the most recent or relevant messages.You Have Impeccable Timing
I love being able to tell a message to alert me later if I can't deal with it now, or swipe it away if I am done reading and don't need to reply (without deleting it). I use Google Keep for my reminders, but for the people who don't have or use Keep, it's nice to have the ability to create reminders in your email (something that you already use every day).You're Part of Everything I Do
Integration with Google Now and Google Calendar is sooo sweet. It auto-maps out locations and appointments for me, it tells me when I need to leave to get there on time (yes, including traffic), it pops up the notifications at the right times. It’s a great little personal assistant. I can't even describe how great this integration is, you just have to experience it over time and see for yourself.You're Easy To Work With
By now you might be saying, "That's all great, but Gmail already does most of this." And it's true, if you're a Gmail power user, you know that Done = Archive, Bundles = folders, labels, and message rules. However, there are a lot of options that didn't exist, and now they are made easy for the everyday person to use. That in itself is a form of genius. Pack your software full of features, but if you have to be a power user to use them? Useless.You're Willing to Improve
Inbox is not without its flaws, and it's still in beta testing mode. Here are some things I'd like to see changed.- Support for multiple email services (this should lead Inbox to dominate all other email!)
- Reminders system (Galaxy S3 has a better interface)
- Select All in bundles (when bundle is open) and in email searches
- The ability to add existing unbundled messages of bundle type to newly created bundles.
- At least one of my friends had a difficult time understanding the concept of bundles, how to use them, and how they could be useful.
- PLEASE do this to my SMS/MMS (Google Voice! and Hangouts).
Have you used Google Inbox? What do you think? Tell me how you really feel in the comments!
