Wide-format e-mail apps for iPhone

Since Apple released the first iPhone in June 2007, a frequent complaint among users has been the lack of a landscape keyboard in more applications. Users got a taste of this wider, larger-button keyboard in the mobile version of Safari and wished they could use it for text entry in other scenarios. Composing e-mail is easily the most-common example; after all, with the exception of those in the SMS crowd, more typing time is spent in Mail than in any other app.

More than a year after that iPhone debut, Apple still hasn't added such a feature to Mail. But thanks to the App Store, a number of third-party developers have provided workarounds. What all these apps have in common is that they give you a text-entry screen with a landscape-mode keyboard for typing an e-mail message; when you're done typing that message, you tap a button to switch to Mail, where your message is pasted into the body of an e-mail message. However, the apps differ in features and capabilities. I took a look at six landscape-mode e-mail-composition apps, testing them with the US English keyboard with English as the system language. All support the iPhone's built-in auto-correct feature; all but one work only with Mail; and none work with the special e-mail messages created by the Photos app for sending photos via e-mail (as those messages are actually created and sent from within the Photos app rather than via Mail).

Wide Email

Wide Email from LizzardWerks lets you compose e-mail in landscape or portrait mode. It provides a subject field for your message that remains visible as you compose your message and is transferred to Mail along with the message. The downside to keeping the subject line visible, instead of scrolling with the message, is that only four lines of message-body text are visible; you have to scroll up or down to view the whole message. (Alternatively, you can switch to portrait mode, which displays eight slightly narrower lines of text.)

Once you're done composing an e-mail message in Wide Email, you just tap the Send To Mail button and the message and subject are transferred to a new e-mail message in Mail (where you can further edit the message, if necessary). You then enter an address and send the message from within Mail.

You can also use Wide Email to reply to a message or to add text to a forwarded message, although the process requires a few more steps. First, in Mail, you tap on the reply/forward button for a message and then choose Reply, Reply All, or Forward. Then you switch to Wide Email, type your reply, and tap Send To Mail; this switches back to Mail and pastes your text into the body of the already-configured message. One caveat here: If you want your reply or forwarded message to retain its subject, leave Wide Email's subject field blank; if you enter a subject in Wide Email, it will replace the message's original subject.

Alternatively, you can tap the Done button to stop editing. The Done button then changes to Drafts; if you tap Drafts, Wide Email will ask if you want to save your changes, taking you to the list of draft messages. (A simpler approach would be if the developer omitted the Done step altogether, as it's superfluous.) If you have multiple messages in progress, you can tap one to edit it. You can send a draft message to Mail at any time.

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