A whole new Outlook

[1]

It seems the Metro design is making its way to everything in Microsoft. The latest victim (in a good way) is Hotmail.

The 16-year old mail service has been given a new face. There’s a thin bar (just as Google’s home page does) at the top, with a menu to switch between your mail, calendar, contacts and SkyDrive. You can compose a new mail, interact with your Windows Live messenger contacts, and access settings and other profile-related stuff from this top bar.
Everyone’s pushing social networking and social integration these days, and we know how Windows Phone 7.5 does an excellent job of it. It’s no surprise then that Hotmail’s new avatar has support for Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn built-in.
The next few features aren’t so obvious at first glance. You have a lot of control over privacy, certain interface features (such as the social pane), choosing to automatically use SkyDrive or not, etc. Spam and Sweep filters work much the same way as before, but MS says that you’ll see less spam in your Outlook.com inbox. You can use keyboard shortcuts from Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo, turn the quick reading pane on or off, and the mails are apparently pre-loaded to give you a more fluid interface.
So, if you’re thinking of shifting to outlook.com, you can use your Hotmail account with the new interface, or sign up for a new outlook.com account and retain the previous address as an alias.