Windows Phone Mango: 10 Things You Need To Know

33-windowsphone7.jpg

Only 7 months after Windows Phone 7 was released, comes Windows Phone Mango. Their vow to base the phone around: communications, apps and web is not mind-blowing but we really liked what we saw. In many ways it dots the is on Windows Phone & and delivers a really polished top-of-the-market mobile OS.

Key feature is intelligent integration. Read on —

1) Available this autumn as a free update for everyone who has a Windows Phone 7.

2) Nokia will be a major partner, launching new Mango devices, but not announcing a handset until the summer.

3) Windows Mango will organise your phone around the people on it, rather than the apps you use to connect to them. Contact-centric organisation rather than app-centric.

4) Integration between native apps is smooth: for example the email and calendar apps connect up and let you sync events with emails. Similarly there’s a smart email box – it threads your inboxes into different sections: all / unread / important, and will associate emails with phone contacts.

5) Facebook integrations. Microsoft must have done a deal with Facebook..
– Facebook events sync into calendar
– Facebook chat syncs into the group chat application

6) Photos – upload straight to social network AND you can use a face tagging service to tag friends and add them to the person hubs that Windows Phone has already set up.

7) Apps – Microsoft introduces some more sophisticated third party apps. Including complex British Airways flight booking app which offers swanky visualisations of seat choosing. There’s a deep integration into the phone – eg. can pin boarding cards to the home screen.
Windows native apps like Office get an update – can collaborate with people on documents in the phone, share easily and sync quickly to your PC.

8) Multitasking – intuitive and fresh. Games pause in mid flight. Designed so as not to drain the battery.

9) Internet Explorer on Mobile – a more full-on experience giving richer visual experiences taking advantage of the graphics chip on Windows phone. IE9 promises to be fast – faster than iPhone.
Bing search takes advantage of inbuilt sensors on the phone to bring location and time-relevant results.

10) Voice control – compose and send text messages by voice control. Swanky. Seemed to work in the demo.

More coming soon….

Anna Leach

2 comments

  • The web-based Marketplace will let its users select and buy any of those 17,000 apps available on its platform on a web browser and can be transferred to their Window phone over the air. The option of using SMS in case of non availability of the web marketplace service is a smart move from Microsoft thus enabling its users to turn on the broadcasted service before even the software is downloaded and installed. Also the company expecting the users to install the apps in the background is fair enough. Another milestone set by the PC giant and also a challenge for the androids is the Multitasking feature on the Mango OS. The prime focus of Mango being the is also something to look out for enhanced cloud integration and better platform tools for developers is a noteworthy highlight.

  • Wow, this update is looking much better than I was expecting. Quite a bit sooner as well. Way to go Microsoft, so glad I picked up a WP7.

Comments are closed.