I downloaded Horizon Mail this afternoon and here's my take on is after about 4 hours of use with my Exchange 2010 mailbox account.
Like:
- Layout: overall the use of space and colors are much better than the stock email app on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
- Notification light: very neat that the app is able to use this feature and allow me to choose the color
- GAL search: very fast and nice to have back since my stock email app does not have it
- Email search: I like it shows the folder of the email that match my query
Dislike:
- Forced signature: My company uses a program to brand and auto-generate our signatures and even though my signature line is blank I get a "- sent from VMware Horizon Mail" sent at the bottom of the email. I'm all for self promotion but I paid for the app and I should be able to turn this off.
- Use SSL not default: security is the name of the game and this should be enabled by default
- Reload on most settings changes: I don't care of the app has to restart on a setting change but to resync the whole mailbox? That's a tad excessive for someone who's playing around with the settings.
Needs improvement:
- Conversation view: The view shows my sent email which is different than I'm used to and confusing to me. For example if I send a mail to a distribution group i belong two I immediately have two emails from myself that look identical in my inbox. It would be nice if it was an option to not show my sent emails. (This is likely something that I can get used to, just initially made me think my emails were duplicated)
- Stuck in manual setup: when I first launched the app I typed my email address in and password and then I clicked on Manual Setup just to look at the options, I was never able to get back to the automatic setup unless I went into system and cleared the app data and relaunched. That was annoying for a technical person like myself but a general users would likely go postal.
- Autodiscover failure: I don't know if its supposed to work but it didn't and I last I checked my autodiscover was configured corrected at work (I think)
- General app responsiveness: The app is a little sluggish and it is tricky to scroll around in a larger formatted email.
All totaled I like this app. I am curious to see how much development time will be spent on this application because I think after a couple of updates this will be a very good application.