Microsoft’s new dark mode for Office.com and Outlook apps aims to save your smartphone’s battery life

Microsoft has gone dark mode mad, with the promise of bringing the functionality to the broad Microsoft 365 suite, along with an announcement that the mode is rolling out to Office.com and the Outlook mobile apps.

You might have noticed dark mode gradually creeping across Microsoft’s various products, from Windows 10 through to the new revamped Edge, so it’s not really surprising to hear about a broader push.

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The new dark mode for Outlook on iOS and Android, and the online Office.com suite, focuses on providing a comfortable reading experience in a dimly-lit environment, having colors vivid enough against the dark background to give them enough pop, but without straying into making them overly bright.

The end result looks slick judging by the (equally slick) video Microsoft put together to give us a flavor of these fresh dark mode introductions.

Dark mode is live on Office.com, and is now rolling out on mobile. With the mobile apps, Outlook for Android will automatically select the mode when the user has turned on the Battery Saver feature (of course, dark mode helps with maintaining battery life thanks to the lesser brightness).

Donnie dark mode

Microsoft notes that with the next OS releases for iOS and Android, Outlook will automatically switch to dark mode based on the preferences the user has set. And with the launch of iOS 13, dark mode won’t just be on Outlook, but will be further rolled out to Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive, Planner, and To-Do.

What’s more, we can expect dark mode to arrive in Planner and OneDrive on the web.

Microsoft is clearly investing in dark mode, then, and its benefits in helping combat eyestrain when using a device in poorly-lit places, and of course the aforementioned battery boosts which are always a major bonus when it comes to portable devices.

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Via The Verge