Gadgetory

hi I'm Kent German senior management editor here at Cena today we're going to take a first look at Outlook calm now outlook calm is Microsoft's new browser-based email service it is free of course and is eventually going to replace hotmail right now it's only available in a preview anybody can download it you can use it on any machine you'll see that even though it has a lot of Windows 8 touches some of the fonts the People Hub you don't need Windows 8 to use it you can move over to it if your existing hotmail user you can jump on it if you're new if you don't like it right away you can move back but eventually Microsoft will move all hotmail users to this system so you want to keep that in mind it's very minimal once design really clean not a lot of clutter at all it's going to look a lot like Gmail in some ways but I think it's even more minimalist than that when you open it up you'll see that the inbox is pretty much what you'd expect from any email service you'll see a list of messages down the front of course you'll see the usual fields of the sender's name the subject line and then you'll see the time and date sent if it's sent in the last 24 hours you'll see the time but if it's sent earlier than that you'll see the date up on the top is the commands bar you can't actually go over and change it to a few a few different colors but that bit of color is really the only bit of personalization here and I still think that's fine because it just keeps the email INBOX just what you need to know it's surfaced directly you can't add a preview pane in Outlook comm so to do that you just go over to the side here click on the cogwheel and add preview pane so of course what that lets you do is that lets you preview as you go down here in my box it lets you preview all the mess all the content that's in there I did like using the preview box for a couple reasons one is that when you're using the preview pane you actually get independent scroll bars for the Inbox so you can scroll down and see all your messages and for this left bar with all your folders but you don't have the preview pane on you just get one scroll bar here on the side so I didn't like that also you'll notice that their ads over here now these are a pretty unobtrusive you pop on them you'll see that your little picture pops up Microsoft says it's not reading your email for the ads I don't exactly know how it decides what ads you get I saw everything from a set of six jelly jars to a Brazilian steakhouse to random seafood plays so it was a really random assortment and microsoft does say that when you open a message so when you open a message from your friend the ads will disappear and I found that to be the case but only when I was using this preview bar so if I went to a message that actually I just sent myself and clicked on it you'll see that the ads disappear but if I go back and I remove that preview pane and I click on the same email then you do see ads appear on the side so not really sure why that's happening I'm going to check with Microsoft now outlook.com does have a People Hub now that's going to be straight out of Windows Phone straight at a Windows 8 to get to it you just go to this arrow and you'll see a mail calendar you can SkyDrive actually it is hooked in with SkyDrive so you get a lot of storage thanks to that and you have a People Hub for finding all your contacts you can integrate Facebook Twitter and other social media services with Outlook calm so when that happens few things so if I get a message from somebody that I'm hooked in through Facebook so just go to this message from Jessica Dole Court you'll see that her photo from Facebook pops right up so I didn't have to insert that manually and you'll see her latest tweet and Facebook status updates you can also tweet directly to her from here you could send a Facebook message directly you could write on her wall directly so it does bring all those elements together of course you don't have to integrate Facebook or anything like that you can keep them all separate but another advantage to do that is you can actually chat with the person as well so Jessica we're in line I could go to the here and chat away so it just brings a nice way to do all of those things in one area now on the left side you'll see you have your list of folders so that's pretty standard you see that on most email services now below that though is a quick view section now this is something that's unique to my Outlook comm what it does is it allows certain number of categories that you can put you can organize your email into now they work a couple different ways there are default categories for shipping updates photos and documents and also flagged now what happens is is when an email comes in that alikom recognizes it as photos attached or it has a shipping update so like a tracking number from UPS it will put them there automatically now this isn't like a folder it doesn't move them there so they remove they leave the inbox they actually stay in variable inbox they just have this sort of category attached to them so if I click on photos for instance I can see all the emails that came with the photo same if I go to documents and same if I go to shipping updates the shipping updates is nice because I'm not sure how that it works exactly but I can go and I can see here and there see I have FedEx status updates so everything is just organized they're now folders are just as they sound folders are where you move things to they leave the inbox mr. web organize your emails so I can click on a folder let go the sale click on work messages here and then I'll show only those messages that I put there so very standard like exactly what you'd expect with photos and videos outlook comm does allow you to preview them directly in the body of the email so I'll open the open a couple of those up and we'll see how they look and when you click on them you will see you can get an instant slideshow so you can scroll through them the photos are big and it's a nice player of course you can download this group you could download them individually or you can send them on to somebody else if a message comes from YouTube and you include a youtube link here you see open that up and the video will actually be in a box and you can just play it right there so do a good job with that and a couple less things that Microsoft did add an Outlook comm is when you're scrolling over an email you can see you get these quick action so there's quick action icons they only appear when you're clicking up when you're mousing over an email they allow you to try to mark it as red trash it or flag it so those are nice because it just saves you a couple steps from going up to a met going up to an bar up here and trying to find a pull down menu you can alter these so you can do a couple others or like Marcus junk or you can do send a folder or something like that once you flag a message a flag message will automatically appear at the top of the inbox so no matter where no matter if it was sent two weeks ago or just just now it will appear up top so that's nice because it just brings those messages right to the top you can choose to hide it if you like but I do think that's a nice touch as you notice this this commands bar will change as you're doing different things so when you're just in the inbox it's only going to show the relevant commands and then when you're in an individual message you'll see all the things you need to do like junk removal or anything like that Microsoft does promise a couple spam filtering features when it tries to make a designation between obvious spam so things like a Nigerian you won the lottery thing or what it calls grey mail and Graham newsletters their daily deals there are the specials you get when you patronize a retailer and then they start sending you something every day some of those things you may want some of the things you don't so Microsoft does allow you to do what's called a schedule cleanup function so if you go to sweep you click on there you go down to schedule cleanup and then you can do things like delete all the messages from a sender you can delete all messages older than 10 days or you can designate the messages that you want saved and the messages that you don't Microsoft does say that if you try to but if you want to block an email it will make an attempt to block all future emails from a sender and attempt to unsubscribe you now my only question about that is if it makes an attempt to unsubscribe you from an obvious spammer does that just until the spammer that your email exist and you're going to get more I'm gonna have to wait and see I've only been using this for a few days so I can't really gauge its spam effectiveness I only have a few messages in it it was a brand new account for me so obviously over time exactly how that works but it's nice to see those spam promises you know spam plagues everybody we all hate it so hopefully Smike restof will do a good job at that so that's outlook.com I like it in its first stages I think that has a nice clean interface it's very easy to understand there are some nice features I like that click view I like those instant action items just appear when you're just appear when you're mousing over your email and I like all the Facebook integration and Twitter I know that's not going to be for everybody but if you have a real digital life and everybody's integrated it's going to be a great step you can get an outlook.com account starting now so your email will be so-and-so at outlook comm and then moving forward if your hotmail users you'll have to get here I'm Ken Sherman and this is Microsoft Outlook com