Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail has surpassed 12 million active users on Apple iOS devices — a dramatic climb resulting from the simplified process for setting up the Microsoft webmail service in Apple’s iOS5. Hotmail has also seen a sharp increase in Android usage, now topping 3 million active users, since releasing an app for the Google platform.

Those were the new stats released by the company’s Hotmail team today, as the company announced another expansion of Hotmail’s mobile footprint: Hotmail is now available as a free app for Kindle Fire, and Microsoft describes it as better than the native email app built into the Amazon tablet.

“Whereas the native Kindle application simply downloads your mail via POP3, with the new Hotmail app you can sync all your mail, contacts, folders, and subfolders via the more robust Exchange Active Sync protocol,” says Microsoft’s David Law in the post announcing the release. “Because the Kindle Fire uses a different implementation of Android, we needed to make some updates to our previous Hotmail app for Android to ensure it worked well. Now that we’ve finished the work and the app is ready, we’re excited to give customers a great Hotmail experience on the Kindle Fire.”

Hotmail’s Kindle Fire app is available for download here.

Thanks to Richard Hay at Windows Observer for pointing this out.

(Charts via Microsoft.)

 

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