Appnoodle

Introduction
One of the disappointments of the G1 and other ‘with Google’ phones is the lack of native support for Microsoft’s Exchange/Activesync. Score iPhone/Blackberry/Windows Mobile.

Whereas it’s unlikely a third party solution will pull in corporate buyers who need the confidence that native OS support can provide, for individuals with the freedom to choose their own device, a third-party app which provides Exchange support could be the answer.

We take a look at probably the best known solution for Android, Touchdown from Nitrodesk to see how it measures up.

Connection
First things first. What’s it like to configure? For us a pretty good experience excepting one wrinkle, of which more shortly.

The last update of Touchdown added a quick connection wizard which tries to discover the connection type with the minium number of steps. This worked fine for us and a connection was established quickly via 3G. The wrinkle? It took *ages* (several hours) before emails appeared in the inbox view despite being visible in the homepage snapshot and notification of new emails being received. Maybe this was because the inbox in question contains a couple of thousand emails (even though the app itself only actually downloads the last 3 days worth).

The User Interface
The ‘home’ page provides shortcuts to mail, calendar, contacts, config options and compose. The Cupcake soft keyboard is supported and the app seems to work well in portrait as well as landscape orientation.

Email
There’s not much missing from Touchdown’s email module and the interface, if not iPhone slick, is perfectly acceptable and similar in look and feel to the native gmail client. Push email is enabled by default and can be set to automatically check for new messages or, if preferred, a polling interval can be set by the user. HTML emails are readable, though rich formatting isn’t supported, as such.

By default, emails up to 3 days old are synced with the device which is probably enough for most people but it’s good to see the option exists to extend this.

Surprisingly blind copying (bc) mail recipients into messages isn’t possible – though the more commonly used carbon copy (cc) is an option. It’s worth mentioning here that there’s support for searching the Exchange GAL (Global Address List) in email and contacts. This is good news since it means only external contacts need to be added to your contacts folder in order to find their details when you’re out and about.

Calendar
First, the not so good. The indication of length of an appointment isn’t represented graphically very successfully in the month view and ‘all day’ appointments are a bit of a mess too. The problem here is that they’re represented by an hour’s slot starting at 12am rather than a more sensible 9am-5pm period. In day view it’s only possible to tell you have an all day appointment if you happen to scroll to the top of the calendar page in order to see what you’re up to in the early hours of the morning…

Creating an appointment is  a simple affair and as well as the usual time, location, description fields, the option to add recipients is also included. This relatively deep integration is good to see. Reminders can be set too.

Contacts
All the basic contact fields you’re likely to need on a phone are available through the contacts module including multiple email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses. It’s good to see the notes field is included too. Handy, when entering details of a new contact so you can quickly record the reason you took their details in the first place…

Dialling out directly from a contact record is supported and you can also add individual contacts to the phone address book via a long click. A nice touch.

Unfortunately you’ll need to keep all your contacts in the default ‘contacts’ folder if you want to access them on your phone since additional folders can’t be accessed in this version of Touchdown. Hopefully that’s something which will be added soon since support for additional email folders is already supported.

In Use
In use Touchdown performed well with our live data set consisting of over 150 contacts, a busy calendar and on average 50 plus recent emails to manage. Updates are quick once the initial sync has taken place and it’s reasonably stable although we have to report a couple of force closes when trying to add a photo to a contact directly from the phone camera – picking a photo directly from the phone worked okay.

Summary
If you’re hoping to see native  Exchange support for your Google phone then you’re likely to be disappointed, at least for the time being. But if you’re wondering whether you can rely on a third party app to deliver the goods, give Touchdown a go. Touchdown’s UI may not yet be perfect but in terms of ease of use and crucially, functionality, it hits the spot.

As for support, no worries there as we received almost instant replies to queries from the developers. Exceptional, yes, but it’s the kind of response a smaller agile company can provide. Hopefully, commitment to customer support will remain as strong as the company grows.

It’s fair to say we’ve given Touchdown a pretty good shakedown over the last couple of weeks so we’re confident in its abilities but please bear in mind we’ve only tried it with one server configuration so take advantage of Nitrodesk’s generous 5 day demo to check it works for you.

Developer web site: www.nitrodesk.com
Price: $24.99
Availability: Downloadable from the Android market with 5 day fully featured trial

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Stop Press!
Nitrodesk have released a beta version of the app which now includes tasks functionality. If you don’t fancy installing it yourself, check out the screen captures below to see the current state of development.