Emergintex

Got the invite tonite for Windows Live Mail Beta. It looks slick as most MS products. Nice usage of Ajax, brings nice refreshing experience to read your Hotmail.
First impressions after the initial wow ! Too much clutter going on. Not sure if this is just my idea, or someone else also reports the same clutter. I dont know why it is there, but things would be good if there was some room for the eye to settle at.

You have the 3 panes (as in Outlook): Folders, Mail headers/subject & Mail body at the rightmost pane. Well this looks ok in Outlook, but is way too cluttered in the Beta service. I guess it is mostly due to the tower Ad on the rightmost side, which is there for your feedback on the service. I am sure this would go out in the Post Beta product. But then the question arises, what about the current Ad Panels in Hotmail? If this real estate is used for Ads again, it would suck. The 3 panels cannot live with the tower ad panel in the right most side.

Moving to the other angle, vertical. I am working on a wide screen 15.4 laptop, and the vertical space too appears to be crunched. The top banner again takes in a lot of vertical space. Dont want to compare, but GMail does a wonderful job in real estate management. The current Windows Live Beta isnt doing that for me atleast in its current Beta phase.

The drag and drop featire is GOOD. You can drag your emails and drop it in one of the folders on the left side. You can also achieve the same task by Move to dropdown on top toolbar.

Search facility within your mail messages appears now in Hotmail. This feature seems to be fast. Good job here. This is just searching the address and subject in the current Beta release.

A lot of visual cues for phishing sites and possible junk email. Any unknown sender (who doesnt appear in your contacts list OR Allow list), is marked as a potential junk mail. I wonder, every new person I get mail from will be marked atleast once. Is that good? You decide.

Will post detailed section by section preview later on with screenshots. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Windows Live

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.