The iPhone features an integrated Web browser, tiltable 7.4-inch gray scale touchscreen, an e-mail client, a 56-kilobits-per-second modem, two phone jacks, a full duplex speaker phone, and a keyboard that slides under the phone to save space.

CNN: InfoGear upgrades phone of the future

Not surprisingly given Microsoft's big cloud push, the emphasis with the upgrade is on improving how well the software scales for internet hosting -- the company wants one common backbone that can handle as little as a small e-mail server to large-scale Azure deployments and virtualization.

ENGADGET: Microsoft delivers Windows Server 2012, puts the enterprise on cloud 8

At the moment, Microsoft says, Outlook.com has 60 million active members, a third of which are Gmail users. (Presumably some of those are true defectors from Gmail, while others use both Gmail and Outlook.com.) Once the Hotmail transition is complete, Outlook.com will have hundreds of millions of users, giving it the same sort of massive scale as Gmail (425 million users as of June 2012) and Yahoo Mail (281 million users as of December 2012).

CNN: Goodbye Hotmail, hello Outlook