So What Do You Think

So what do you think of the new Hotmail?

The massive rollout of the new version of Windows Live Hotmail began in September and, as with any change to a highly popular service, there was much public outcry. iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, and countless other services have received much backlash as they updated their user interfaces. All of them, however, stood by their changes, and so has Microsoft, while listening selectively to feedback, of course:

Microsoft said:

The rollout has been slow because we've been reading and listening to your comments. We've read all the comments, followed up with some of you, and changed the service as we went. Since our original announcement, we have read and analyzed several thousand comments, fixed several bugs, and released five updates to the code. So, we want you to know that we're listening, we're making changes, and we want the service to be great.

Q: Can I opt out? Can I get the old version back?
A: We can’t provide two fast, secure, reliable experiences, so we have decided to just keep the new version. However, we will continue to improve the new version, based on many of your comments here, to make it work better for you.

Last Friday Microsoft announced that everyone should have the latest version of Hotmail (Windows Live Wave 3 or 3.0) by "the end of the week." A Microsoft representative confirmed with me that the company has indeed moved all of its users to the new version (except for a small group still using MSN Premium). According to comScore, Windows Live Hotmail is still the leading provider of e-mail around the world. However, in the US it is in second place (to Yahoo Mail), and furthermore was the only one to experience a fall in traffic in September.

The new service is supposed to be 70 percent faster (for signing in, as well as viewing and opening e-mail), have a new cleaner look that merges the classic and full versions of the service, allow customizing with colors and themes, and have better spam filtering and security features. Also, the reading pane allows for checking e-mail without having to open it up, typing in the "To:" line is improved by offering more closely-related e-mail contacts, and e-mailing groups of people is easier (thanks to Windows Live Groups). There's an integrated calendar (calendar sharing, an automatically generated birthday calendar for people in your contact list, a holiday calendar, iCal subscriptions to public calendars, and to-do lists) and instant messaging features. Finally, storage is "ever-increasing," (starting at 5GB and moving up 500MB monthly as the user needs it).

Read more at the source.


Later Ted

Yes well, I use HotMail and it does seem faster at logging in and refreshing when you receive new Mail and it does look allot cleaner, But maybe it's a bit too clean and if you ask me maybe a bit stale. So yes it is more functional but it seems in a way less enjoyable to use, saying that I didn't know you could customise it so maybe I will have a play and see if I can make it a bit more appealing.

mansrm81 said:

I like the new hotmail layout cause in the classic version you had to scroll back up to the top to delete messages.

I agree, that was something that used to bug me in the classic version