What’s This?
class=”author_name”> By Seth Fiegerman
2013-05-23 1:05:41 p.m. UTC
Mailbox, the much-hyped e-mail app for the iPhone, is now available for the iPad.
Like the iPhone app, the iPad version of the Mailbox lets users schedule incoming messages to read later and sort into different lists, dry as “The Order” and “The Watch,” with simple gestures. In this way, the app is Intended to help users perform “triage” On Their inbox while on the go. Indeed, the iPad version of the app is perhaps more striking for how it looks similar to the iPhone app.
“We wanted to create a consistency across screens. That’s really been driving a lot of the Design Decisions,” Mailbox’s founder Gentry Underwood told Mashable . At the same time, Underwood said the company wanted to avoid adding too many more “bells and whistles” simply because the iPad’s screen offers more real estate.
That said, Mailbox’s iPad app does feature several subtle changes designed to better tackle the e-mail experience on a tablet. For starters, leavings of the “lists” tab open on the side while browsing through your inbox is Intended to ease inbox organization. The iPad version is also designed so That the keyboard does not overlap any of the text in the body of the email, making it easier to type messages.
Mailbox released its iPhone app in early February, but initially required users to reserve a spot in a virtual line in order to download – an effort to scale up its servers. At its peak, nearly one million people queued up to download the Mailbox app, showing the demand for a better email experience on the iPhone. Mailbox signed up one million users by late March. Underwood would not comment on how many users have signed up since, though he said That growth has been “really healthy” and user retention so far has been “extremely exciting.”
Just over a month after the iPhone app was released, Mailbox was acquired by Dropbox for a rumored $ 100 million. Underwood says the two companies were a good match for one another, both in terms of Their logos – both have blue and white branding with, as he puts it, “four letter words Followed by ‘box’” – and more importantly, Their missions .
“We believe if you can build tools That enable people to work together with less friction, you are speeding up human progress,” he said. “That’s exactly the same mission that I hear repeated before and during our conversations with Dropbox.”
Underwood describes the working relationship between the Mailbox and Dropbox as similar to That between Instagram and Facebook. Mailbox operates as part of Dropbox, but “has its own brand and roadmap.” But by joining forces with Dropbox, Mailbox gained access to valuable resources like scalable backend systems and design and engineering talent.
“We thought the chances of us taking the market rather than just Identifying it would be Increased [with Dropbox's resources],” Underwood said.
As it turns out, the Mailbox team was working on an iPad version before the acquisition. In fact, an iPad prototype existed even before the release of the iPhone version, but the company DECIDED to focus on the smartphone instead. That said Underwood Mailbox is currently developing apps for Android and other platforms, but does not yet have a set timetable.
Image via iStockphoto, tropicalpixsingapore
Topics: Apps and Software, Business, Dropbox, email, ipad apps, iPhone Apps, Mailbox, Startups
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