Windows Phone Mango: 10 Things You Need To Know

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….