The bad news is that all of Hotmail's new features aren't carried over to Outlook. For example, the only Hotmail contacts you'll be able to see in Outlook will be those native to Hotmail itself -- you won't be able to view contacts from social networking sites such as Facebook. And while you can see your Hotmail e-mail in Outlook, you can't use the Conversation View for it, which is odd, considering that Outlook 2010 has its own Conversation View. Perhaps in time integration will improve.

There are a lot of other very nice extras in this version of Hotmail, including integration with the newly released . When you're sent an Office document, you can save it to Skydrive -- Microsoft's free online storage service -- and from there open it in Office Web Apps, which is Microsoft's free online version of Office.

If you need heavier editing capabilities than are provided in Office Web Apps, you can then open the document in Office on your PC, although you'll need to be using Internet Explorer to do that. You can then save it back to Skydrive.

Speaking of attachments, you can send whopper-sized attachments in the new version of Hotmail if you want -- up 10GB in one message.