Remember Windows Live Essentials, the service that went through its early beta stages back in 2006 and never made it out of beta, that’s meant to “offer integrated and bundled e-mail, instant messaging, photo-sharing, blog publishing, security services and other Windows Live entities into a seamless whole”? Today Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Experience Blog talked about how Windows 7 + Windows Live will “complete the Windows Experience” together – once again through the suite named “Windows Live Essentials”. The reasoning behind this, as explained by Brandon, is that:

Microsoft has learned that many end-user experiences need to be updated more frequently. Instead of waiting for the next Windows release, we began delivering updated versions of the Windows Live applications to improve those end-user experiences. While this was a great way to improve the Windows experience for users, many of these updates in Windows Live Wave 2 seemed duplicative of applications already in Windows.

To address this, Microsoft will now only ship these applications (which include Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Writer and now Windows Live Movie Maker) as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.

Along with the Windows Live Wave 3 beta download package – comes the new Windows Live Photo Gallery that we’ve been talking about over and over again. First things first, here’s what you get when you load up Photo Gallery:

Simplicity is the word to describe my first impression of the new program. They have abandoned the Vista-feel to it by reducing the bottom rotating/zooming/viewing functions to the bottom-right hand corner. The menu bar up the top is now elegant white. But for those who wishes extra customisation like Messenger offers, I’d be sorry to disappoint you that similar to the previous version of Photo Gallery, it doesn’t support changing the colours of this menu bar at the top. But hey, it’s the rich functionalities that matters more than a colour-changing menu bar, right?