From Apply Now,
Your Guide to Web Usability.
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The next generation of Microsoft’s web mail service, Windows Live Hotmail has been released and it has undergone a transformation to make it even more intuitive and easy to use. With a whole new host of features this release aims to bridge the gap between Hotmail and its competitors. To learn more we assessed Microsoft’s latest offering and came up with the following list of pros and cons:

Pros:

• The new interface is clean and customizable with users able to modify the theme to suit their personal tastes. They can also switch between the Classic and New View, with the latest style resembling Outlook which will reduce the learning curve for a large number of users.
• It now offers 2GB of inbox storage, or 4GB for $19.99 a year, which is a vast improvement from its predecessor that offered only 2MB per account.
• The new drag and drop feature allows messages to be easily moved and organized into folders. Shortcuts have also been introduced to allow multiple email selection and deletion, quick replies and more.
• Hotmail continues to offer a wide selection of anti-spam controls ranging from creating a list of contacts to block to restricting attachments, images and links from unknown senders.
• ‘Compose mail’ offers an inline dictionary (and thesaurus) that highlights incorrectly spelt words in the same format as Word.
• Microsoft has increased the cut off period of inactive email accounts from 30 to 120 days, which will be a great relief for those users that have previously lost emails due to this.
• They have integrated an audio player that lets users open Windows Media Player to listen to attached music files or play the songs directly from their inbox.
• The new attachment feature allows users to view files from their hard drive and rename and edit images before attaching them.

Cons:

• A great aspect of Gmail is the grouping of emails and replies into “conversations” to allow exchanges to be easily followed. This is unfortunately not present in Hotmail as it continues to use the standard sort and group technique.
• It does not integrate Microsoft’s instant messenger with the email account, like Yahoo and Gmail does, as each application still needs to be opened separately. But, it does provide presence information to show contacts that are logged onto Messenger at the same time as you.
• The Inbox does not automatically refresh like it does with Gmail.
• Some features, such as the integrated audio player and the advanced attachment options, work only in Internet Explorer.
• Despite the storage increase it is still smaller then competitors, with Gmail offering 2.8MB (that keeps growing) and Yahoo providing unlimited space.

In summary, Windows Live Hotmail is a vast improvement from previous versions and its attempts to resemble desktop email applications works well. The new features will also be well received by their current client base but at this stage I’m not sure if it will convince others to make the switch.