I just got an invitation from Microsoft last Friday to test the forthcoming Hotmail service, Kahuna. I am definitely not the first to do a review for Kahuna but I hope this entry shares the experience of using it from a diffrent point of view. Well, there are quite a number of good reviews written, such as this article from PC World, this article from PCMag or even this comprehensive list of features from MSN.

Kahuna is the next version of Hotmail and it will have 2GB capacity. It utilizes the latest web technologies such as AJAX, which GMail is also using. Since Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express is still having the largest user base for Windows-based email client applicaiton, Kahuna tries to bring the same user experience into the web application.

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Mail Box

On the Today page, which happened to be the welcome page, we will see some messages from Microsoft regarding this beta version of next Hotmail. To give us the user experience of Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, we will see the user interface of Kahuna is very similar to them with three columns design:-

• The left column shows us all the folders,
• The middle one shows us the email(s) in the folder respectively, and
• The right column shows us the content of a particular email.

Figure 1 | Click To Enlarge

Somehow, the folder Icon didn’t show up when I was viewing it, several refresh attempts didn’t make the icon to appear.

One of the improved feature in Kahuna is the ability to automatically flag any spam or phishing email. Maybe this Beta version is not fully implemented yet as it didn’t recognized the email from their own company, Microsoft, and flagged me with the message “This message is from an unknown sender.” as we can see in Figure 1 too.

A few more great features other free emailing services don’t have like drag & drop the email from the middle column into the folder in the left column. Just drag & drop will do to transfer a particular email. Besides, right click on the email in the middle column will show us the functionalities to reply, forward or even print the email.

Compose An Email

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As for the feature of composing a new email, while we are typing an email address, a list of possible contacts will be listed. It is kind of slow to see this feature to be implemented because as we known Yahoo! email and Gmail have already had such ability since a long time ago. As usual, email in Hotmail will be scanned using TrendMicro antivirus. One of the great features in composing email is the ability to continue writing while uploading the attachment to the email. This will certainly save us some time with such multitasking ability in Kahuna.

Calendar

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The calendar is almost identical to what we see in Microsoft Outlook. We can alco access to Tasks, Reminders, and Notes. one thing new is the ability to share the calendar with other Passport users. This reminds me of the latest Google Base, a new Google service that allows us to share our events with friends as well.

Contacts

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Well, the contact page utilizing the three columns design too.

• On the left, we will see the categories of all contacts,
• The middle column shows all the contacts in a category.
• The right one shows the information of a particular contact.

Conclusion
I really can’t give a good review based on my experience with Kahuna. The speed of loading a page was bad, most of the time the page was not fully loaded. Not to mention the broken image link (These two might be affected by the knock-on effect of my bad Streamyx connection I suffered for the past few days). Besides, another disappointment was that Kahuna current only support Internet Explorer (IE). So, for the sake of this review, I got to use the long abandoned IE in my system. Moreover, Kahuna utilizes ActiveX technology a lot, thus, I needed to enable all ActiveX in the Security Option in IE to make sure all pages loaded with no problem.

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As a result, I switched back to the old version of Hotmail by clicking the Beta opt-out link in the Option page eventually . What I can say before ending this entry is the currently available beta version (a closed-invite beta) of Kahuna is not finalized yet. So, it’s inevitable to see some flaws in the system. Nonetheless, I must agree that Kahuna is a huge improvement over Hotmail in term of functionality and user interface. Before I forget, the logout page is no longer directing us to MSN.com, but to Start.com instead. :)

So, let’s hope the launching of improved Kahuna will happen in near future.