There are plenty of alternatives to the Gmail app within the Play store, and having instant access to your email wherever you are is important to a lot of people. We’ve put two of the best alternatives head to-head to see which one comes out on top.

K-9 MAIL is free, designed for Phone and needs Android 1.5 to work on.

The app connects quickly to your email account, and recognises most domains. You can also alter the import settings to pinpoint things you want transferred over.

Folders that hold your sent and received emails are easy to find, and accounts can be switched between easily. The inbox can look very cluttered without filtering your emails.

Filtering emails is a generally easy task, and can be sorted by the sender of the email, subject or even by the attachments that came with the email.

K-9 uses a simple system to help you create emails. You can copy and paste email addresses from your inbox to your new email to save you time in typing them out.

Your entire mailbox can be customised to make it easier to identify specific emails. Individual emails can be altered to include your name and a custom signature.

 

MAILDROID is free, as well; it has been designed in order to be used on phones and it works on Android 1.5. Of course, newer versions of the Android OS (read more on this topic) are handling perfectly this application

Similar to K-9, setting up MailDroid is easy enough. You can connect as many accounts as you want, and then switch between them within the app.

Emails are displayed clearly, and can be put into coloured categories. All your basic email management functions can be found on your email's inbox screen.

Once again, filtering your emails is pretty easy to do, if not a little hard to find the correct menu to do it from at first. Filtering does take a few minutes to complete.

Contacts that are saved on your device can be imported in to your email, as long as an email address is saved. Composing an email is a simple process to complete.

There are plenty of settings that can be altered to make using the app a lot easier, and many to alter the look and layout of any emails you send and receive.

 

In my opinion, MAILDROID is the winner of this contest. It’s a close contest, and both apps are great alternatives to Gmail MailDroid just pips K-9 to the post thanks to its far less cluttered system of displaying emails, and the ease of which this can be changed through the app,s comprehensive settings menu.