You may have been using Symbian's built-in Mail widget selection and main application for so long that you can conceive of no other interface. But if you fancy trying something a little different then take a look at qooMail, a new third party interface onto your existing Symbian mail accounts, the highlight of which is probably an ultra-compact homescreen widget. More below.

From the Nokia Store listing:

qooMail is an innovative and easy-to-use app based on your Symbian mail accounts.

Main Features:
- Customizable homescreen widget, showing summary of all accounts
- Customizable notification light, when phone is locked
- Auto expanding list
- Smart text view
- Swipe gestures 
- Quick-Reply dialog
- Sync all pop3 and imap accounts at once
- Styles: black, white

Here's qooMail in action:

When first run, qooMail goes off and retrieves its own stash of your email messages. This can take a minute or two; (right) the email list view is fairly standard, though note that there's no kinetic scrolling (yet)

Tapping on an email opens up a sizeable preview pane - for many emails you may not need to bring it up full-screen (as shown, right) at all...

Even more interesting is that you can swipe to the right to bring up hot actions, e.g.  reply, delete, or swipe to the left to open the email up properly; (right) the star here is probably the homescreen widget though, showing the essence of the last four unread emails in a very compact '4x1' widget frame.

As with all the 'qoo' applications, qooMail is very configurable, with two screens of toggles and settings, as shown here.

qooMail is still in the comparatively early stages of development and needs, I suspect, road testing with real world email configurations. Comments welcome on how road warriors from the AAS community get on with this as an alternative to the standard Symbian widgets and mail application.

You can buy qooMail for £1.50 in the Nokia Store here.