It’s now approaching the third week since Hotmail changed their format, which negatively effects over 350 million users. While the web version is mostly a step backward, it’s Hotmail’s Mobile Internet site that is appallingly buggy and has become frustrating to use.

Here are some example problems on the iPhone that are new to Hotmail’s revision:

• The Hotmail mobile site does not stay logged in as you go from place to place, so each time you go to the Inbox you must re-enter your email address and password. This is a gigantic pain.
• Nearly half the time the password is not recognized on the first try, forcing you to enter it yet again.

• The “Word Wrap” functionality no longer works on many of the emails. This means you have to scroll horizontally to read a story, which no one wants to do.

• The pinch feature has stopped working, so there is no way to increase or decrease the font size. Whatever size an email first appears is where it stays.
• Content such as photos inside an email no longer resolve automatically, forcing the user to click the “show content” link much more often than before
• The Back arrow always brings you to the first page of your email list. That’s fine if you are working on Page 1, but let’s say you are reading emails on Page 5. After you’ve read an email you click Back, expecting to get back to the list on Page 5. Instead, you are brought back to Page 1. That means you have to keep hitting the forward arrow until you reach Page 5. To read multiple emails on Page 5 means you must go through this process every time. Another gigantic pain in the . . .

It’s awful that Hotmail has gone live with what is essentially a pre-beta version of their mobile site. They care about their customers and want to keep them, right? They want subscribers to spend more, not less time on Hotmail, correct? They want to expand their customer base, don’t they? Then how can departments at a company like Microsoft replace a perfectly fine product with such a buggy one? Where is the quality control?

Microsoft – like Google and Yahoo! – don’t believe much in customer service. Even premium subscribers to Hotmail, or people who’ve spend hundreds of dollars on Google’s Nexus One phone, have no direct way of getting in touch with a human at these companies. Have a complaint, a question, or just want your money back? Good luck.

Hopefully Hotmail keeps track of complaints and we can only assume that they know about the problems with their Mobile Internet site. Let’s just hope they care enough to fix it soon.

This article can also be found at Mobile Marketer.