Earlier today, reports are coming in that users are getting Hotmail’s Exchange ActiveSync working again. I went in and tried it on my iPod touch, and to my surprise it actually worked perfectly – it synced all my mails, contacts, and calendars from Windows Live! Here’s a couple of screenshots of Hotmail Exchange ActiveSync working on my iOS:
As you can see, your inbox, sent items, deleted items, drafts, junk folder, as well as all of the folders you created can be synced over. In fact, I’ve found the synchronisation to be very instant, having received new e-mails on my iOS and the desktop at the same time. Even the read/unread marks are getting synchronised across instantaneously. Of course, I’m testing this over Wi-Fi, so your experience may vary depending on your data connection.
Contrary to what we’ve read in the comments section, it seems like all of your calendars on Windows Live Calendar would sync – this includes the calendars you own, the calendars you subscribed to, the calendars shared with you, and the calendars that are part of Windows Live Groups. This actually sounds better than Windows Phone 7’s implementation, which limits to your main calendar only. Here’s a few screenshots of my Windows Live calendars on the iOS:
In addition to mail and calendar sync, all of my Windows Live Contacts are being synchronised across too – this of course includes all of my Facebook contacts (de-duplicated too!) since I’ve connected the Facebook service to my Windows Live account. One slight problem though – if you’ve “liked” any pages or groups on Facebook, those are considered as contacts too, so you might see a contact named “Avatar” on your contact list. Do take cautions that if you’re trying to add Exchange ActiveSync on your iPhone, it might pollute your existing phonebook.
Based on the comments we’ve seen, we speculate that only those users who had attempted first to get Hotmail Exchange ActiveSync back in June would get it working this time around (it pays to read LiveSide! 
). Those who hadn’t will receive an e-mail instead, similar to below:
Hello <Your Name Here>,
To get Hotmail on-the-go, you recently tried to set up a service called ActiveSync from your mobile device.
We are really glad that you’re interested, but we had so many sign-ups that we had to temporarily stop accepting new ones.
We’re making constant improvements and we should be accepting new requests fairly soon. Please check the following website in about two weeks to see what’s happening: http://www.hotmail.com.
Thanks again for using Hotmail–we’re really sorry about this delay.
Sincerely,
The Hotmail Team
So it seems like the Exchange ActiveSync rollout may begin as early as two week’s time from now. Do you have it working yet? If so, which devices do you have it working on? Let us know by leaving a comment below!