Zune HD Now with Mail Capabilities

Zune HD owners out there will certainly rejoice learning that they can send and receive mails from the touch-screen digital media player in their hands, courtesy of a new Exchange email client coming from Matchbox Mobile.

The company is already known leader in custom software and application development, and is the first one to come up with a mail client for Zune HD on behalf of Microsoft.

Zune HD was meant to be a media consumption device, but it already evolved into more than that, and the new mail client for it adds more functionality into the mix.

Previously, Matchbox Mobile delivered official Facebook and Twitter clients for Zune HD, which determined Microsoft to choose it for the release of a mail application as well.

The new software comes with support for Windows Live Hotmail, and for Exchange and Gmail, as well as with the ability to both receive and send emails, and was built using Zune’s XNA SDK.

The development process proved a challenging one, mainly due to the fact that the said SDK was aimed primarily at the building of games, and not for the development of standard applications.

“On the XNA platform there are no standard controls such as lists, buttons or text entry fields which could be utilized in the development. Instead, Matchbox had to create each element,” the company explains.

“For a user interface-intensive application such as an email client, with its many complex lists and structured views on data, this presented quite a challenge.”

Another challenge emerged when it came to the storage space needed for over-the-air specifications and the limited HTTP and HTTPS programming interface.

The company also notes that they first referenced to Windows Phone, and then they mapped the application back to the Zune HD version of Metro, since the Windows Phone's design language was built around it.

“This was a complicated development challenge,” said Dave McLauchlan, Senior Business Development Manager Microsoft Zune.

“We knew we needed an expert team whose experience and technical abilities were world class, if we were to succeed in giving Zune HD users email functionality.

“Matchbox’s past development efforts for Zune HD and Windows Phone indicated that they were the right team for the job, and the resulting application proved that we made the right choice in asking them to deliver what was an extremely complex project.”