Microsoft has today added to its ever growing stable of iPhone apps, launching a new email app for Apple’s smartphone, called Send.
Joining Outlook as a Microsoft-branded iPhone email app, Send is available to download for free from the App Store today, though you will have to be in the United States or Canada in order to get your hands on it – Microsoft is keen to get the ball rolling slowly to kick things off, it seems.
If you do live in the right country and decide to give Send a try, you will notice that it is absolutely nothing like Outlook, and Microsoft no doubt doesn’t want to cannibalise the market that Outlook has been trying to etch out for itself. The new Send app, rumoured for a few months now and previously thought to be called Flow, is designed as less of an email app and more of an instant messaging solution piggybacking off of the email service we all know and loathe. Gone are subject headers and signatures, and the whole app and experience lends itself to short, perhaps even one sentence messages that could probably be sent via iMessage or similar instant messaging solutions instead.
Where Microsoft is going with Send, we’re not quite sure. The world arguably doesn’t need another instant messaging solution, and the fact that Send is using email to make the whole thing work is an odd decision in our eyes. We’re sure Microsoft knows what it is doing, or at least thinks it does, but we haven’t been able to put our finger on it just yet ourselves.
As if to drive home the point that Send isn’t a standard email client, only messages sent via the app will be available to see within Send, though those messages will also be readable in company’s Outlook app as well. Again, not a lot of that makes sense to us, but it probably does to someone at Microsoft.
Probably.
If it sounds like a good idea to you, download Send from the App Store today. An Android and Windows Phone version is apparently in the pipeline also.
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