MSN 8 launches in the UK

 

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By Matt Whipp

Posted on 26 Nov 2002 at 13:39

MSN premium subscription service, MSN 8, launches in the UK today

The service is offered on a two-month free trial, after which it costs £6.99 a month or £59.99 annually. This is on top of any charges for internet access from your ISP.

BT has also signed a deal to offer its broadband access with MSN 8 from next year, and both companies are 'committed to a special offer' to their customers of both services, to be announced in January, marketed by a £2.5m campaign.

For your money, MSN 8 offers you nine password-protected accounts and a complete new interface. Navigational items are fully scaleable, so you can squash them down to simple text buttons or expand them to graphical icons on the fly.

There is also a new email client. This offers more versatile spam filters that learn which type of messages are treated as spam as well as giving users greater control over them. There are also filters systems in place at the server side of the equation from Brightmail. Finally, McAfee provides antivirus analysis and cleaning tools.

Composing creative emails is made easier with the ability to quickly add in graphical elements along with editing photos within messages, courtesy of Photo Plus from Picture It!. In addition to this photo-editing software, you get 100Mb of online storage.

A column on the right-hand side, which MSN designates as its 'Dashboard', contains Messenger contacts, financial reminders (linked in with Money) and other alerts.

A download manager puts downloaded files in one place where you can find them as well as adding the ability to resume interrupted downloads.

Messenger can also be used to browse the Internet with people from your Messenger contacts. You invite a contact to 'shared browsing' and if they accept, their pointer appears on the Web page you are looking at. You are then able to browse together, and communicate through Messenger.

There are also powerful child controls that allow parents to limit the type of content available to their children, no matter which machine they are using (provided they are logged in through their MSN account). MSN 8 also allows parents to see who their children are communicating with and approve or stop that communication. Parents can set up an approved address list for their children and receive a weekly report of their children's online activities. Children can request access from parents in real time to any content denied them by the parental filters.

MSN Learning and Research Plus uses the resources of Microsoft's Encarta software to put a 35,000 article strong encyclopedia at your disposal, as well as tools for research and homework projects, and a dictionary, thesaurus, atlas and deadline planner.

Lastly, an online Calendar can be accessed from anywhere and can sync up with handhelds and Microsoft Outlook.

The MSN.co.uk site will still exist as a free online portal, giving access to Hotmail accounts. And while MSN 8 can be used on a narrowband connection, the full benefits of browsing Encarta and online photo-editing will only be fully evident to those with a broadband connection.

For more information see msn.co.uk.