Sparrow for iPhone… my verdict

Well you gotta hand it to them, they’ve created one lovely app to use! But as they say ‘you don’t look at the mantlepiece when you’re poking the fire’ so… Looking at what I wished they’d do, let’s see the results:

1. Support two-way synchronisation of sent mail. That is, if I send a mail on my iPhone it does not appear in my other clients. Done.

2. Proper deletion of mail. Moving an item to trash on the iPhone will archive it in Gmail. I know that this is configurable with the IMAP version but there are plenty of reasons why not to go down that route. Also it would be nice to have the option each time; something that the Sparrow Mac app has done nicely. Done and done: They went the extra mile on this one and it’s a lovely solution.

3. Seamless multiple email addresses. It would be nice to be able to add one Gmail account to my iPhone and still be able to send mail from the other outgoing addresses it might use. Done: Again they’ve done a real nice job implementing all of the functionality available in the Mac client for this area including full SMTP support per-address.

4. Assuming that 3 is implemented then multiple signatures. Done!

So they’ve done everything I wanted! Great right?… Well, no. You see I kind of left one requirement implicit since I don’t know how an email client can tout itself as such without support for push email.

This is a tough issue it seems. If you check on their website, Sparrow state that this feature was fully functional in the beta builds but their method was rejected upon submission to Apple. They’re currently running a petition which I urge you to sign since, with push support, this would definitely be my email app of choice. But, then again, maybe it will never get Apple’s approval for that exact reason :’| It’s times like this when I have to acknowledge some of the complaints of the anti-Apple-pro-OSS fanatics—perhaps they have a point.