Microsoft’s Outlook email and calendar client is one of the better options on iOS and Android, interestingly, and offer a number of helpful features for managing email messages and appointments. Today, Microsoft is announcing some upgrades to Outlook on both platforms to make communicating, even more, efficient with the ability to schedule Skype calls from within the app.
Essentially, Outlook for iOS and Android now supports adding a Skype Call when creating a calendar event, which creates a link that participants can click to launch Skype and join in a call or group message. Anyone who doesn’t have a Skype account or app installed can utilize Skype for the Web to join a session.
Other changes include updates to the calendar section to allow navigating more quickly to any day and the addition of a two-week mini-calendar view. A new three-day view lets users see a large slice of a weekly schedule at once, and Saturday, Sunday, and Monday have been added as week start preference options.
Finally, the Android version of Outlook enjoys improvement navigation, with a navigation bar offering Mail, Calendar, File, and People buttons for quicker access.
Microsoft also wants everyone to know that they’ve been listening to users in providing updates to Outlook. Here’s a list of the most-requested features that have been added:
- Contact push (20K+ votes): Save your contacts to the default Contacts app for iOS and Android.
- Save files to your Android device (22K votes): Save files and attachments to local device storage.
- iOS calendar widget (6K votes): An upcoming update will provide an iOS Notification Center widget for Outlook.
- iOS print (5K votes): Print emails using AirPrint printers.
- iOS 3-D Touch (3K votes): Use Quick Actions with 3-D Touch technology on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus.
You can suggest features by going to Settings > Suggest a Feature. Clearly, Microsoft is listening, and the most recent updates to Outlook for iOS and Android make Microsoft’s offering a compelling choice on those platforms. Now, we can hope that Microsoft will spend a little more time on the Windows 10 Mail and Calendar app and bring some of these nifty Outlook features along for the ride.
