I recently got my hands on Google Inbox for Android and the PC, which is Google's attempt to re-design Email. The following are some of the best features of Inbox in no particular order.

Material Design - The first thing you'd notice about this app is the super-clean interface, similar to the updated Gmail app. The Inbox app similar features from the compose icon to the menus. A key visual difference is the colour (blue compared to white) and the layout.

Bundles - These replace, the typical email "labels". Bundles, however, are far more intelligent than standard categories. Users can set of notifications for bundles and decide when they show up on the inbox: as the arrive, once a day or once a week. It is extremely easy to create a bundle or even transform existing labels into bundles. Filtering has never been this easy.

Highlights - Many commentators noted Inbox borrows a lot from Google Now. These changes were already happening with the previous version of Google. For instance,  if you got your tickets booked online, they appeared as cards in your Gmail. Now, Inbox takes this once step further and automatically previews important messages such as flight itineraries, event information, documents emailed by colleagues or friends. So for instance, if you have a bundle labelled "work", you could browse through all the documents that you have received in the highlights sections, even if documents were sent by multiple contacts. Inbox also shows the real-time status of flights and package deliveries, in its clearest nod to Google Now, which also does the same.

Reminders, Assists, and Snooze - Reminders, built right into Inbox are great because I don't have to keep switching between apps to find my reminders (Google Keep for instance). Right now Reminders do not register with Google Now (as Google Keep does) but I don't think that's a serious issue. The best thing I like is the easy swiping for "done" or "snooze". Swiping to the right allows you to mark an email as "done", while swiping to the right "snoozes" the image, and bring it back up at later. This is great if you fancy yourself as a productive person who hates a cluttered inbox. I began by archiving all my emails (on the previous version of Gmail) before switching to Inbox. I feel this is far more productive because there is a sense of pleasure one derives from marking something as done. If you want to keep track of an email, you can choose to "pin" the email, and one easy swipe of the pin switch (next to the search icon) and all you see are the emails you are tracking. Assists are basically designed to help users by providing contextual information but this probably doesn't work as well in Sri Lanka.

Misc - if you are switching to Inbox, make sure you clean up all  your email using the regular Gmail app. Also, keep in mind that Inbox is not mature just yet, so you can't use it to configure your IMAP clients, pre-load your email signatures, or use a variety of rich features common to Gmail. It is possible, however, to use Gmail and Inbox simultaneously. So just because you choose to experiment with Inbox, doesn't mean you get locked out of Gmail forever.

By Navam Niles