Microsoft has announced a revamped version of Hotmail and now calls it Windows Live Hotmail. In a press briefing in San Francisco, Chris Jones, corporate vice president for Microsoft spoke about the changes in the company's mail service. The new Hotmail focuses mostly on the revised Inbox features, adding/sharing photos and MS Office documents. Is Microsoft taking on Google? We say this as all these features are already present in Gmail.
It was about time that web's one of the most popular free mail service Hotmail got a well-deserved revamp. New Windows Live Hotmail does carry the same social networking interface on the landing page. Once you go to the Inbox, you'll be offered options to manage the clutter. For instance, the new Sweep feature that helps you get rid of the mails that you don't want anymore. These mails could be newsletters, or website offers which you have signed up for sometime in the past but don't want to receive now. Such mails can be directly moved to other folder or Trash cab. This is pretty much similar to the Gmail filters option.
New Hotmail also offers automatically sweeping the mails from the Inbox. In case you've added your Gmail and Yahoo Mail Inboxes, then they can be swept too. Apart from that, the new Hotmail will allow auto-preview of photos without leaving the Inbox. It also offers a preview of photos from third party services like Flickr and SmugMug. Alternatively, it gives users an option to upload photos and share them through Microsoft' cloud-based SkyDrive. Thus, users just have to email a link instead of sending a bunch of photos.
Even videos from third party services like Hulu and YouTube can be watched without leaving Hotmail. For the mobile devices, Microsoft will allow pushing Windows Live e-mail, contacts and calendar onto cell phones using Exchange ActiveSync. However, for using Hotmail and corporate Exchange account, users will have to use a smartphone that supports dual ActiveSync connections.
Hotmail will also allow viewing, editing and sharing Microsoft Office documents even if the Office suite isn't installed in the system. So naturally, Hotmail will take help of MS Office Web's editing tools.
Hotmail users will also get a number of separate views for watching social network updates, shipping information, email from other inboxes and so on.
The most important update is that Microsoft will now offer an option to use an encrypted HTTPS secured connection. We believe this option should be set as default just like Gmail did after it saw a cyber attack originating from China.
Microsoft will also offer an option to add multiple aliases to a single account and update a mail account with a new name. Both these features are currently under the testing phase and would be made available sometime later.
New and revamped Windows Live Hotmail will be rolled out to users in the coming week.
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