14 DAY TRIAL // The first Beta of Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 is starting to roll out to users worldwide, as today, June 24th, 2010, marks the availability deadline for the first public testing milestone. As I type this, users in the Nederlands are the first in line to get the Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 Beta bits, which they will be able to test on Windows 7 and Windows Vista, as there’s no support for Windows XP. This is, of course, valid for all versions of Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 Beta, a suite that includes applications such as Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Sync, Writer, and Family Safety.
On June 24th, “Hot on the heels of the Hotmail roll-out, the new Windows Live Essentials becomes available for public beta testing. Windows Live Essentials beta requires Windows Vista or Windows 7, and is available in English, French, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, or Spanish,” Piero Sierra, group program manager, Windows Live Essentials, revealed.
At the time of this article, the Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 Beta bits were not yet live. Still, watch this space and I’ll make sure to provide an update once the downloads are given the green light from Microsoft. Sierra underlined that the Wave 4 iteration of Windows Live Essentials had two aspects at its core, namely building a bridge between Windows 7 and the Cloud services users simply couldn’t live without, and enhancing the PC with additional functionality beyond what the Windows clients offered by default.
“We’ve designed Essentials to connect your Windows experience to the web services you already use – not just the ones from Microsoft. The new betas of Windows Live Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, Writer, and Messenger connect to photo and video sharing (SkyDrive, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, SmugMug), social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin), email (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail), blogging (Spaces, WordPress, Blogger), and document productivity (Office Web Apps) services. And the new Windows Live Sync keeps your files synchronized across multiple PCs and in the cloud. You can even directly access your PC over the web with Sync's new remote desktop feature,” Sierra added.
Microsoft continues to be a firm believer in the fact that services alone cannot replace desktop-side applications. This is part of the company’s vision of software-plus-services, as opposite to Google’s software-as-services strategy. In this context, the software giant will continue to offer rich clients for Windows that will stretch the OS into the Cloud.
“People like to get creative on their PCs as much as they like seeing what everyone else has been up to. Whether it’s Retouch, Panoramic Stitch, or Photo Fuse in Photo Gallery, Auto Movie in Movie Maker, or Photo Mail in the new Windows Live Mail, we think you’ll be excited by the new additions to Essentials that make advanced tasks, well, easy. If you haven’t yet tried PhotoFuse to merge together the best of several photos, it’s a lot of fun,” Sierra noted.
UPDATE: Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 Beta is available for download here.
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