Austin Carr, writing at Fast Company's Co.Design blog:

It’s actually proved to be a more modern and nimble alternative to many of its mainstream counterparts, and boasts many novel features that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, even with its beautiful redesign of Outlook, should all heed lessons from.

His review has some images and a really good explanation of how Alto feels. Fast Company's Adam Bluestein spoke with Alto's team leads, and that article is also worth a look.

The articles compare Alto to Pinterest, but it looks to me more like Evernote, with note titles and summaries on the left and notebooks in a larger “stack” layout pane on the right. Regardless, it looks elegant and functional, which is what I want from websites and apps. I’m really impressed by how it looks and the philosophy behind what they did, including empowering an insular team to build it outside of Aol’s larger structure.

In fact, Alto looks so well-designed that, if I was in charge at Aol, I probably would have had them launch without much of a mention of Aol at all. It’s unfortunate but true that the Aol brand is really a handicap to anyone trying to do something as bold as redesigning how we use email. Some people may see “Alto, by Aol” and skip it altogether. I almost did.

Alto works with many popular email services, including Gmail, so I’m excited to see how it works. You can request an invite here. I’ll write something more in-depth when I get the chance to try it out.