By Al Kalman

It is now approaching the fourth week since Microsoft?s Hotmail changed its format, which negatively affects more than 350 million users.

While the Web version is mostly a step backward, it is Hotmail?s mobile Internet site that launched full of bugs and has become frustrating to use.

You?ve got nailed
Here are some example problems on the iPhone that are new to Hotmail?s revision:

o The Hotmail mobile site does not always stay logged in as you go from place to place, so often times when you go to the Inbox you must re-enter your email address and password. This is a gigantic pain.

o Nearly half the time the password is not recognized on the first try, forcing you to enter it yet again.

o 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.

o 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.

o 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.

o The Back arrow keeps bringing you to the first page of your email list. That is fine if you are working on Page 1.

But let us say you are reading emails on Page 5. After you have 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 ---.

Hot potato
It is awful that Hotmail has gone live with what is essentially a pre-beta version of its mobile site.

Hotmail cares about customers and wants to keep them, right? It wants subscribers to spend more, not less time on Hotmail, correct? It wants to expand the customer base, does it not?

Then how can departments at a company such as Microsoft replace a perfectly fine product with such a buggy one? Where is the quality control?

Microsoft ? like Google and Yahoo ? does not seem to believe much in customer service.
Even premium subscribers to Hotmail, or people who have 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. We can only assume that it knows about the problems with its mobile Internet site. Let us just hope that it cares enough to fix everything soon.

Al Kalman is president of AlKal Media Group, New York and Washington. Reach him at .