Recently I’ve had occasion to do a fair bit of testing to see which mobile email client has the sexiest email rendering out there. After staring at lots and lots of screenshots through our eDesign Optimizer and tracking the prevalence of these mobile clients via our new MailboxIQ I think I’ve narrowed it down to a triumvirate: iPhone (so far the leader among the three), Palm Pre & Google Android. As a matter of fact I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the latter two devices rendered as beautifully as the iPhone, which I always assumed, was light years ahead of the competition.
After looking a little closer and somewhat under the hood it’s become clear that these rendering heavyweights have something in common: they are all using the Webkit Open Source browser engine. What’s Webkit? It’s the stuff that gives Safari its mo-jo and makes us go ooooooh and aaaaaah when we stare at emails on our smart phones.
Although the phones mentioned here all share a common rendering engine not everything is 100% identical. Let’s talk about some of the differences to better understand what’s going on here…
The Palm Pre has come the furthest—the evolution between the Garnet and the Pre could be thought of as a quantum leap. The previous device’s native mobile email client had limited HTML support that wouldn’t even render nested tables properly and had no support for CSS. The new model is a leap forward with really gorgeous rendering which reproduces email as your design department intended it to be seen regardless of the smaller screen. In addition there’s wide support for CSS and a cool feature that highlights subject lines on a blue background.
The Google Android phone has a few characteristics that make it seem like it’s trying to bridge the gap between the mobile and web/desktop email client world by choosing to incorporate an option to enable images. An onscreen button is displayed when email with images arrives prompting the user to take an action in order to enable and render the images.
One other nuance with the Android phone is the default size of rendered emails: Unlike the iPhone & Pre—which resize emails to fit the screen and effectively shrinks them down—the Android phone enables a left to right scroll bar for emails that may have formatting that exceeds the viewable screen size. What does this mean for marketers? Well, I think the same advice we’ve been giving out on how to handle preview panes applies, here, keep your branding and calls to action high up and to the left so that they don’t appear “off” the screen.
A recent report from Gartner predicts that Symbian (the current world-leading OS) and Android will be the number 1 and number 2 market leaders by 2012. This is going to be an interesting race to watch as the speed of innovation and diversity in terms of handsets is like nothing else email marketers have ever had to deal with before—although there are numerous laptops out there, you can hardly tell them apart, but that is far from the case with mobile handsets and operating systems.
Although there seems to be a bit of convergence happening in terms of how these handsets are rendering emails, the details and capabilities are distinct enough to make consumers really have to think about what kind of capabilities they want out of their smart phones. The key takeaway is this: the smart phone is moving full-steam ahead and our future as marketers will definitely be tied to the “smaller” screen.
By Len Shneyder
Director of Partner Relations & Industry Communications | Pivotal Veracity
Last 5 posts by Len Shneyder
- Job Opening - Product Manager EMM - May 12th, 2011
- The New Mail.com Webmail Client - March 30th, 2011
- The New New Yahoo! Mail Beta - March 18th, 2011
- Mail.com Bulk Foldering 90% of Inbound Mail - February 24th, 2011
- HTTP, HTTPS, Gmail, IE – INCONCEIVABLE! - January 6th, 2011
