If you have clung onto Hotmail all this while, a new portal awaits you, its called Outlook.com, riding on that familiar email programme well used in corporate environments. Just go to Outlook.com and login with your hotmail email address and password.
You will discover a much cleaner look and some keyboard navigation options which are helpful. I don’t know how extensive as I took a very quick look.
I abandoned Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail once GMail surfaced (in 2004) as these had both become a wasteland of junk mail for me. Also GMail was a whole new invention.
In hotmail there is Microsoft Smart Screen now and hopefully it prove be as effective as the GMail filters. For now, I love the mark spam option which says “my friend’s account has been hacked”! That is an option which is still sorely needed!
There are actually sections – Mail, People, Calendar and Sky Drive. The new interface is seen in Mail and People.
In “People” the clean new interface is great to manage your contacts, and keyboard shortcuts are active. I deleted a bunch of un-named contact by selecting them with a space bar and scrolling through with my arrow keys before hitting the delete key; looks promising. And you can import contacts from Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and Linkedin.
SkyDrive and Calendar will lead you back to the Windows Live interface and these will presumably be integrated into the new look later. Click the Windows Live icon at the top left to get back to Outlook.
Well, this looks promising for the many hotmail users who have not yet switched to gmail. However, many of them might not even know about this as yet, so suggest they login to Outlook.com for a pleasant surprise!
As for me? I’m heavily invested in GMail and nothing I saw here actually impressed me, so this was just a tour. Hotmail was on my name card in the late-90’s (Hotmail was introduced in 1996) and I still get people trying to reach me there. A permanent vacation reply announces that I am in GMail.
Read reviews like the one from TechRadar.
Otterman speaks... 