When you install Windows Live Mail, either for the first time or as an upgrade to an older version, go straight to Calendar.  For the first time, Windows Live has a complete, working, beautiful, and fun calendar.

First of all, it’s beautiful.  Clean, elegant, simple.  Even though it works in harmony with the online Windows Live Calendar, you’ll want to use the Live Mail version (and that’s the beauty of software + services!).

While Google Calendar has taken over much of the early adopter market share, Windows Live had to wait for Feedsync to get to a point where it could be deployed.  That’s been painful in the short term.  In the long run, it’s a calendar (and a sync mechanism) worth waiting for.

Creating an event is simple, just click on a day and start filling out information:

Or you can enter an email directly as a Calendar event:

Just right click on an email, add to calendar, and input the date information, and save.  Once you do, you just click on the event on your calendar, and the body of the email is included.

And then of course all of the information you’ve entered into your Windows Live Calendar from Live Mail is available anywhere you can log into www.calendar.live.com, including that email you linked.  Online, you just mouseover to see the info from the email (but it’s not as pretty!):

The online Windows Live calendar, with sharing via invitation or publicly, anywhere access, and connection to other calendars is still there of course, but now you can control it from your desktop.  Of course you can also create a Windows Live Event online, and add it to your calendar.  At this point that functionality is pretty basic, but we’ll see how much and how soon that changes ;). 

Oh, and yes there is more in the new Windows Live Mail.  Aside from a bit of a facelift, and what unscientifically seems to be much snappier performance, there’s a new button to “Check Names and Email”, and some improvements to the Newsreader (long newsgroup names now wrap, instead of being cut off, for one). There will be new functionality around Photo Emails once you send them, but the basic functions in Windows Live Mail remain the same.  And that’s good.

We’ve been using Windows Live Mail to manage our LiveSide email for our individual accounts and for feedback and tips, and it already has been far superior to Outlook, even with the Connector, for managing multiple Hotmail accounts.  Now with better performance and a new calendar, we’re even happier.

Read more LiveSide reviews on the new Windows Live betas:

Wave 3: Windows Live Movie Maker Beta

Wave 3: Windows Live Writer – A First Look

Wave 3- Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta – What’s New- A Comparison With 8.5

Wave 3: Windows Live Photo Gallery – New Features