why mobile optimized email is suddenly more important to me

my last post was about optimizing your email or designing your email for mobile devices... and what to know and consider when your readership hits the tipping point... today i want to blog about why mobile optimized email is now important to me.

if you've followed my blog for any amount of time you can gather that i'm a bit if an apple fan, but i've made the jump to an android phone, i've not left the fold fully, i still own and use my macbook, my macbook air, and my ipad mini. but now, i'm the owner of an htc one, which is by far the "iphone killer" that android has been trying to produce for a while. i say this because finally there is a phone of enough build quality and design, a polished version of the droid operating system, along with supporting apps that i use all the time on my phone to make the transfer to a new piece of equipment and platform easier and worthwhile. think of what you went through when you went from pc to mac, and you'll know what i am getting here.

that said, android isn't without issues, perhaps later this week, i'll tell you what i miss and what i like better, but for now, i'm embracing the htc one... but mobile optimized email is suddenly even more important to me...why? unlike the iphone, the android devices don't autoscale the emails like i am used to. in a lot of cases, i have to not only scroll up and down, but also have to pan left and right to see and read most of my incoming html based email.

that is, until i discovered the scaling option in the gmail app. the gmail app, not the native android mail app, will allow you to autoscale the emails and they'll look very similar to the way they looked on the iphone. but that doesn't mean that email marketers shouldn't be looking at ways to push their email designs and to forego adoption of adaptive design principles and practices. the more of us that exploit that technology for the greater good, the sooner email clients and apps will make it easier for all of us who read and open email on our mobile devices by supporting adaptive email design and autoscaling.