Microsoft kills Hotmail and introduces Outlook.com: A look at the new features Hotmail's dramatic redesign brings it kicking and screaming into the present, which is long overdue, as the service has been in need of new features and a fresh coat of paint for some time now. The rebranding of Hotmail to 'Outlook.com', combined with Metro UI styling, sees Microsoft continue to unify their products around a single design concept, one that has received a lot of positive feedback ever since its debut on Windows 7 smartphones two years ago. Let's look at some of new features and services coming soon to Outlook.com: Metro UI Outlook.com has effectively been built on top of the Hotmail service that preceded it, but you'd never know it thanks to the new Metro UI redesign. Clean lines, block colours and plenty of contextual menus help to hide the complexities of the software behind a simple user interface. If you are a Windows Phone user you'll feel right at home with the new design, as will future Windows 8 users once the desktop operating system hits the shelves later this year. Outlook.com is very similar to Gmail in regards to its design and layout, but the Metro styling offers enough to differentiate Outlook.com from Google's email client. Threaded Messages Outlook.com offers a lot of the standard features of modern email clients, such as threaded messages, which intelligently group together all emails from a given conversation into an single easy to manage thread. This has been