New Metro-style Hotmail allegedly shown in leaked screenshots

We heard yesterday about a possible Metro-style redesign for the venerable Hotmail. At that time, we had minimal information, but German site WinFuture purports to have the first leaked screenshots of the new webmail. If these are real, it’s the kind of minimalist design we’d expect, with brightly-colored flat backgrounds and tile-style icons for switching between Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and SkyDrive. It looks usable at this point, but some oddly-placed blank space suggests more features are coming soon, and WinFuture says there’s also a mysterious vertical bar that’s not shown in the screenshots.

We’re not sure how or how much the author got to interact with Metro-style Hotmail, but he reports that several features are still unavailable. If real, however, this still looks pretty good, and it seems in a reasonable state of development for release around the time of Windows 8. It also would make it less likely that we were seeing a placeholder image in the last leak. You can see the full set over here.

Thanks the-hq!

Update: LiveSide has also posted English-language screenshots here, including the one above, which references the service as “NewMail.”