Windows Live Apps

CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
Detailed editors' rating
Setup and interface: 7.0
Features: 8.0
Performance: 0.0
Service and support: 7.0
Overall score: 7.6 (3.5 stars)
• Average user rating: 2.0 stars out of 4 reviews
• See all user reviews

Product summary

CNET editors' review

• Reviewed by: Elsa Wenzel
• Reviewed on: 11/12/2007
• Released on: 11/07/2007

The Windows Live apps package is a free download of six tools that manage e-mail accounts, chatting, blogging, photos, and parental controls for children surfing the Web. This download includes Windows Live Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery, Writer, Toolbar, and OneCare Family Safety. Rather than serving as a portal to and promotion for its makers' various Web-based consumer services alone, Windows Live apps integrate with some third-party services. Therefore, you can use Windows Live Photo gallery to upload to Yahoo's Flickr, and use Windows Live Mail to read Gmail messages.

Features
Windows Live Mail is the desktop successor to Microsoft Outlook Express. It enables you to stream messages and contacts from Hotmail as well as POP and IMAP e-mail services. That means there's free integration with Gmail and Comcast accounts, although you must pay Yahoo $20 to enable POP. The interface of Windows Live Mail drops messages into a roomy central pane while listing various accounts on the left above RSS feeds for your custom news, as well as Newsgroups and Windows Live Messenger. You can tailor Mail to reflect your favorite colors, too.

The prominent Add an E-mail Account button is a constant reminder of Microsoft's hopes that you will use its new Mail client as a portal for third-party e-mail. Mail's strong points include its Photo E-mail feature, found under the new drop-down menu. It has the capability to attach multiple photos, integrating with Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can also create a blog entry from the message composition window.

By default, Windows Live Mail is set to the highest spam-blocking and anti-phishing filters. You can change these settings and create lists of blocked and safe senders for extra protection. Windows Live Mail also enables digital signatures and encryption.

Windows Live Messenger, which we've reviewed separately, hooks into both Windows Live Mail and the online Hotmail. Mail will reflect when your IM contacts are online and then take you to Messenger's chatting interface when you want an instant conversation.

Windows Live Photo Gallery enables photo management and quick fixes, such as red-eye removal, exposure adjustment, and cropping. When you import photos from a camera, Photo Gallery will auto-rotate them to display upright. It will also cluster pictures taken within a day of each other, similar to the Events feature within Apple iPhoto '08. If you haven't set the time on your camera, however, prepare for headaches. You can tag pictures by topic and upload them to Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, and MSN Soapbox. You can stitch together photos for a panoramic effect.

And there's new QuickTime support, so you can preview any videos mixed in with your pictures. As you mouse over pictures in the gallery, larger thumbnails will pop up to provide a better view. However, we couldn't figure out why this feature worked sometimes and failed at other times. Plus, it was hard to see the folders where the images were stored, and you only see image file names when you roll over or open the image. And while we could easily crop a photo, we couldn't find a way to resize it before sending it in an e-mail to a friend who wanted to receive a ready-made thumbnail rather than the full 2,048x1,536 pixels.

See more CNET content tagged:

Microsoft Windows Live Mail,

Microsoft Windows Live,

MSN Hotmail,

Microsoft Windows Live Messenger,

Flickr

User reviews

• Average user rating: 2.0 stars out of 4 reviews
• My rating: 0 stars Write review

• Showing 3 of 4 user reviewsSee all 4 user reviews

• 3.0 stars

  1 out of 1 people found this review helpful

  "enjoyed it so far, but"

  by johnboy7514 on November 17, 2007

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• 1.5 stars

  "Too slow, CPU and disk access HOG!"

  by wmt2 on October 16, 2008

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• 3.0 stars

  "Usable, but too pushy with MS software"

  by luckyk on July 2, 2008

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• See all 4 user reviews Write review

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