Microsoft has been on a roll with a bunch of high level announcements, and the company seems nowhere ready to slow down. One of the main Microsoft services that required a well needed makeover, is Hotmail, and thankfully, the company did just that along with a name change. The new mail service is called Outlook.com, it brings to the table new features and what we all wanted, a Metro user interface.

Outlook might be the new top of the line email service from Microsoft, but for the time being, Hotmail will still be around. However, it will lack the new look and features of Outlook.com. Good news however, is that once you begin using Outlook.com, it will feel like you have never left Hotmail, since everything will be there and new emails will show up nevertheless.

For those who are interested, there is an option to change your email address from @hotmail.com, to @outlook.com with complete ease. If you want, you can also create a separate @outlook alias to your account. We don't see much use in the latter, but we'll be definitely be changing over to @outlook just to get the bad taste of @hotmail off our lips.

We like how Microsoft is making all of its main web services easily available at a click or a simple touch of the screen. To get to your People, Calendar, or SkyDrive, just simply click on the arrow beside the Outlook logo, and voila, magic happens. In all honesty, Microsoft's Metro design makes it easier to navigate the mailbox when compared to Google's Gmail, and it is also easier to access other services.

At the top, you know, that little blue taskbar that stands out, there you will find stuff like MSN Messenger, Facebook Chat, and Settings. Just like Outlook on the desktop, users here will have the option to change the reading pane to either the left, right, or bottom.

Do you know what will get folks extremely excited about Outlook.com? Skype! In a future update, Skype will make its way to the web in Outlook; users will be able to send IMs along with video calling. Since Microsoft bought Skype in 2011, we have been waiting for the company to incorporate it into its products, but nothing happen. Finally, Microsoft is ready to make use of Skype by adding the service to Outlook.com, and we can't wait to get our snuffy little hands on it.

Users on smarthphone devices such as Windows Phone, iPhone, or Android, will be able to get full access to Outlook.com with all the bells and whistles. The only downside here is Silverlight, it is bad, and not needed the slightest since we have HTML5...ever heard of something called Flash? We can't seem to recall what that is. Anyway, the image slideshow feature in Outlook.com requires Silverlight to work, which means, users on mobile are out of luck, unfortunately.

We've been using Outlook.com all day, and the main thing that surprises us, is how easy it is use compared to Hotmail. It's like a simplified mobile page with full webpage features. It even makes the last Gmail update looks pretty old, that's how good it is. Not many words we can use to describe Outlook.com, but what we can say is this, it is super clean, the boys over at Redmond are going for gold with this one.