Product Reviews

Windows Live Messenger is the latest incarnation of Microsoft's chat application. The revamp is more than a cosmetic change, with significant new features. The chat function, however, remains mostly unchanged. There is still a full range of emoticons and gestures to use, although these have been bolstered with more active winks and nudges to liven up your conversations.

Microsoft has introduced Shared Folders to swap files with your friends. You can consider this a drop-box for each of your contacts, to which they and you have free access, which is synched whenever you are both logged in. This is a useful way to share files with a single person but, if you want to make items available to all or a selection of your contacts, you physically have to copy them for each contact.

With a direct swipe at Skype, Microsoft has fully integrated voice chat with this version. You can talk for free to any other Live Messenger user. Microsoft has teamed up with Verizon to let you dial out to any mobile or landline anywhere in the world. As with Skype, you have to buy credits in advance, but you can choose to top up your account automatically when the cash runs out. This means you won't have a call interrupted part-way through because you've run out of credit, which can happen with Skype. Call costs are competitive, at 1.4p per minute including VAT to most of the developed world.

Rather than integrate the phone application into Messenger, making a call to a landline starts a separate application called

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Windows Live Call. You can use it by dialling a number directly into Windows Live Call or by right-clicking a contact and selecting Call phone. If you're dialling directly, you have to use the full international dial code. Microsoft doesn't subscribe to the international standard of using a leading + before the country code, as Skype does, so you have to remember to dial 00 instead. Once you've dialled a number, you can save it to your contacts list for quick dialling later.

Call quality was good, although we noticed a slight delay in setting up the call, which we haven't noticed with Skype. Windows Live Call provides only basic calls, though, and there are no alternatives to Skype's Voicemail or SkypeIn, which let you rent a regular phone number for your VoIP connection. There are not as many handsets available for the service, either; read the review of Philips' phones on page 39. Windows Live Messenger, as with previous versions of the software, is UPnP compliant, so it reconfigures a UPnP-compliant router automatically to let it make a connection to the network; this should be needed only for the voice part of the software, as the messaging should work through most firewalls.

Video calling to other Messenger contacts is supported via webcams. It helps if you have a UPnP-compliant router, as this makes video calling easy. Call quality depends on your internet connection, but we were pleased with the results. Users of previous versions will wish Microsoft had left the interface alone. Although it is still functional and well integrated with the whole Live suite, it's more cluttered and the new finish makes it harder to fight your way through to the useful tools.

As far as instant messaging goes, Windows Messenger Live is the best client around and the new features make it even better. The addition of voice dialling makes it a suitable alternative to Skype if you're just interested in making the occasional call when you're away. If you're more interested in making voice calls, Skype is easier to use, has more features and has a wider range of handsets that work with it.