Microsoft announced their Wave 3 release of the Windows Live suite of PC applications today complete with public betas of the respective applications. Windows Live Wave 3 includes applications such as a completely redesigned Live Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety. You can download the new betas by going to http://download.live.com/. Remember that these are beta versions of the applications so think twice before installing them on your PC

Here are some of the key things about each of the new Live applications.

Mail beta is able to manage all of your email accounts from a single application. The app supports online services such as Hotmail, Live Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and various others. You can also share a single contacts list with Windows Live. Windows Live Mail also syncs with the web calendar in Windows Live (which is also sharable to others you might know).  Though I haven’t tried it out yet, this could be a viable alternative to using Outlook on some systems.

As mentioned earlier, Messenger Beta received a complete redesign in this release. You can still chat, make phone calls, video calls, play games etc with Live Messenger Beta. You’ll also be able to customize your profile and the look and feel of the conversation windows. There’s also a new “Updates from contacts” feature which notifies you of what your friends are up to on the net. Think of it as Facebook notifications meets Messenger. When your friends go offline, you will also be able to send SMS messages to your friend via Messenger

I’m a huge fan of Windows Live Writer (simply known as Writer). Writer received some nice new features in the beta release including support for almost every blog service out there including Windows Live, Wordpress, Blogger, Live Journal, TypePad, Sharepoint, Community Server, etc. You’ll even be able to publish videos directly to MSN or YouTube via Live Writer.

Photo Gallery photo library manager and a photo editor. The app will let you share and receive photos from friends as well as tag pictures (tag friends, items etc) for easy retrieval later on.

With Wave 3, Movie Maker gets brought into Windows Live complete with a new design for the application. You’ll be able to easily create movies from photos, video clips, and music and then upload them to the web.

You can read more about the new Wave 3 release via the Windows Live Wire blog here.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows Live, Wave 3