Outlook.com and WP7

I saw the notice that Microsoft was going to deprecate Hotmail and replace it, eventually with Outlook.com.  I went to my Hotmail account and changed to the new UI right away, and I really love it!

But I've got a serious question I'd need answered.  It's my understanding that Hotmail and all of it's various email addresses (hotmail.com and live.com) will eventually be going away.  I got the feeling that it would be a good idea to get an outlook.com email address as soon as prudently possible.  Well, my wife and I both have a Windows Phone (currently on the Mango release 7.5), and both of our phones are associated with our Hotmail accounts.  How do we move that to a new outlook.com account?  I've not seen anything anywhere about this, and I'm sure that others are like us and kind of confused as to what the next step(s) are.

I thought I read that they were going to migrate accounts and simply change the @hotmail  to @___ ?

@RodAtWork:

Your hotmail address is here to stay. And MSN will replace hotmail name with outlook for awhile and change it back to hotmail again.

It is a simple thing, people only use outlook at work, not at home. They will not use outlook at home, they use hotmail and those people will complain hotmail disappeared. So eventually they will change the button name back to hotmail on MSN again.

My suggestion, wait for 3 years before you switch to this lazy branding service. Outlook.com will only make more confusion to the users and be dropped again. It sounds negative, but, confusing is simply confusing, no matter how they want to spin it with statistic chart and politically correct reasoning. Human and users are largely not turing machines. 

You guys are overcomplicating your explanations. To keep it simple:

Your @hotmail.com address won't go away or be moved. It's just the name of the service and the site, and the address for new users, that are being changed. Existing addresses aren't. You can change it over yourself if you like, though.

It would be nice if when you renamed your account it would just add your old address as an alias. Then there wouldn't be any worries about losing incoming messages. At this point its probably impossible to recover completely if your old email address suddenly stopped accepting mail. You'd probably be able to get the important stuff switched over, but there would definitely be something that slipped through the cracks.

@blowdart: Yeah, it's that hard reset of my phone that I'd like to avoid.  But concerning my Hotmail address I'd like to change it anyway.  I've had it for 10+ years, and it's a really lame name.  I've continued with it only because I've got so many things tired to it (vendors, newsletters, etc) that for me, changing it wasn't something I wanted to do.  However, this gives me a chance to just push through it and do it.  Would it be a good idea to try and secure a Outlook.com email address now, something that I like better, and then see if I can migrate everything over to it (phone included)?

@kettch: I think they'd recommend setting up an @outlook.com alias rather than actually changing your account name in those circumstances.

(This issue won't really affect me since all my main email accounts are gmail, but I found hotmail (and now outlook) to provide the best web app for managing multiple accounts with so I use it as little more than an online POP/IMAP client )