It’s almost three months now since the announcement of Kahuna-the new interface for Msn/Hotmail.Finally I got an invite from Microsoft.With yahoo also announcing that they are going to update their interface and gmail’s continuous splurge in popularity Microsoft has some competition.Lets see how it fares.Here is a short graphical review of it(Click on the thumnails for full size images).

The welcome screen:
MSN Today

The Inbox
The new 3 pane inbox certainly looks a lot less cluttered now.But there is one major functionality issue for me.Suppose you want to trash some of the message.You have to do them one by one.They have removed the checkbox.

However a very handy addition is that you can drag and drop your messages.

Also Kahuna features a customized right click menu just like in Outlook.

Now you can create your own folders and group your messages.This is somewhat similar to Gmail’s idea of labeling emails.Microsoft has clearly taken a leaf out of Google’s book.Now you can search your emails in Kahuna too.


Hotmail is optimised for viewing at 1024×768 resolution.However even at that resolution a Kahuna cropped away the edges of some mails.

Microsoft claims that Kahuna would be able to alert you about suspicious phishing emails.It did correctly pick out one fake Paypal email that I had received.

Composing emails

Nothing special here.Standard rich text formatting options are available along with the familiar MSN Messenger smileys.Kahuna also looks up addresses from your buddy list and suggests it as you type.

Calendar

The calendar sports a neat and tidy look.You have the option of being alerted on via MSN Messenger, email as well as Mobile.

All in all I think it is definitely a major improvement.Microsoft says that it is going to provide you upto 2gb space.However I am not sure about the maximum attachement size.However I dont think that there is any limit on the total size of attachements.However Kahuna now supports Internet Explorer 6 more later.Hopefully in future it would add support for Firefox and Opera also.

In case you are interested in trying out Kahuna you can enroll yourself here

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