WATCH OUT, GMAIL: The New Hotmail Is Surprisingly Cool
This was the old Hotmail. It was pretty awful. Everything on this page was slow to load. The red arrow indicates the little icons that were often tough to click on. You had to hit them just right. And note the hopelessly small 25MB storage space.
Before the redesign, Microsoft tried to fix the upload problem with a system called Silverlight, which it asked all users to install. This thing never worked properly, and at times sending attachments in Hotmail was almost impossible. HotFAIL at its worst!
This is the new Hotmail. It's totally stripped down. Super simple. No instructions needed. Note the ads are discreetly off to the side
To write a new email, just hit this button, and you get ...
This incredibly minimalist new email palette. It's almost entirely white space — a huge visual change for both Microsoft and Hotmail, both of which are famous for their boxy clutter.
Let's explore some more. All the main functions are packed into this one arrow button.
If you click on it, you get these options.
The people button contains all your contacts. Again, so easy a child could navigate.
The calendar is the same way.
Skydrive is Microsoft's answer to Google Drive — and it's arguably better designed.
It's not perfect, however, and Outlook/Hotmail has one glaring flaw ...
Hotmail's email search function is terrible. These are the results I got searching for "T-Mobile." I know there's a recent email about T-Mobile in my folders somewhere, but as you can see, Hotmail's search has failed to dig it out. (And yes, I get some pretty weird emails.)
It's actually right here, in one of my folders. Why can't Hotmail find this!?
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