AOL is launching an Alto app today for iOS (and Android) that aims to offer a fresh take on email. AOL’s new app features a single dashboard that intelligently organizes the most important info from your email, calendar and elsewhere.
Alto, which was previously available on the desktop for a limited number of testers, hopes you’ll want to ditch the traditional inbox-format for email, serving up the most important info from emails in card-form in what it refers to as the Dashboard.
Underneath the single Dashboard approach is a more traditional looking-email client that offers most functionality you’re used to, but the single Dashboard approach is meant to makes things more efficient by combining all your inboxes and calendars from work and various email providers. It works with just about any email address with support for AOL, Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, iCloud, Outlook, Exchange and any other IMAP email provider.
We have a different way of doing email. Alto goes beyond the typical inbox by providing intuitive organizational tools and features like Cards and Stacks that automatically highlight the most important and timely information. Find photos, attachments, flight schedules and more without the hassle of scrolling and searching.
The app’s user experience is not entirely unlike Google’s approach with its “Inbox by Gmail” email app that offers a similar stream of important data from your email and calendar with intelligent automatic organization features.
The Dashboard also integrates with your calendar to serve up cards based on upcoming events and other calendar entries, and it offers quick access to third-party apps and services. “Every card is designed to let users take immediate action on that data. For example: users can call an Uber to get to the airport, map out the fastest route on Waze, check into their flight, or share their delay and arrival times via messenger all from Alto cards.”
And the Alto app also hopes to cut down on manual sorting and archiving of emails you have by automatically organizing emails “into ‘Stacks’ that allow users to easily organize, manage, and find specific email categories.”
You can download Alto for iPhone and iPad on the App Store now. It currently has language support for English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
