AOL: Mail, News, Weather & Video 3.2.1

For those of us who have been using the Internet for a long time, AOL’s name certainly rings a bell. Sure, the company may have lost some of its shine over the years, but it’s still a big name in the tech industry. Founded in 1983, AOL has gone through multiple name changes before settling on the current one back in 2009.

Hoping to keep up with the times, the company has mixed its services together into an app that wants to offer users an “all-inclusive” experience. Sadly, for reasons unknown (that likely have something to do with my location) I wasn’t able to test out one of the big parts of this app, which is the mail reader. That’s because setting up an AOL account is damn near impossible and even though my Bucharest postal code was accepted in the process, my phone number was not (even though I use it for two-factor authentication with a series of other US-based services).

Theoretically...

As disappointing as it was, I will at least tell you what the Mail feature is supposed to do and not how it handles. According to the company, the service will load your AOL Mail messages. The number of unread emails should appear on the home screen. You can handle the emails without even opening them by swiping to the left to reveal a short menu allowing you to delete the message, mark it as read, unread and soon, move it to a certain folder or flag it. There’s also an easy way to filter the Inbox by checking out only the unread, read, flagged or unflagged messages.

Now, on to the parts that we actually got to test. The news feed works pretty nice. The articles are arranged in nice-looking cards and the headlines are easy to read. Once you decide which ones you want to read, you can tap on it to open. The photo, headline and source of the article are available at the top of the page. The articles can be shared just like any other content and the font size can be increased or decreased to fit your eyes’ needs.

The app’s side menu gives you access to a series of categories, such as “entertainment,” “tech,” “world” and so on, allowing you to read news only on a certain topic.

Get all the extras

The AOL app also sports a video section, where you can view recent content, varying from news reports to funny videos. There’s also the search feature so you can scour the Internet for anything you want via company’s engine.

The weather tool tells you how many degrees there are in your city and the general conditions, as well as how the weather’s going to be like in the next few days.

All in all, this is a nice tool, but it wasn’t too nice that I didn’t get to actually test the entire thing due to AOL’s issues.

Add to watchlist:

Search engineNews reader/RSSEmail

• Opera Coast 4.10
• Google 5.2.0
• Chrome - web browser by Google 40.0.2214.69
• The Guardian 3.2.0
• BuzzFeed 4.2.5
• Newscron 4.0.8
• Microsoft Outlook 1.1.0
• Yahoo Mail 3.2.16
• Inbox by Gmail 1.2.2

Portable version:

• AOL: Mail, News, Weather & Video for Android