AshMan says…

Windows Phone 7.1 ‘Mango’ – It’s Coming!

AshMan Says…

Following the successful launch of Windows Phone late last year it has started to make its impact within the market. Since that launch there have been a number of updates with the most notable being ‘NoDo’ which brought Copy & Paste to the platform. Just recently Microsoft released information for what will be known as Windows Phone 7.1 or more publically known as ‘Mango’.

 

Mango is the first major update for the platform and is bringing 500 new features and 1500 new API’s. When they mention 500 new features they aren’t just a few minor updates to features which are already there, they are 500 new additions to the platform.

 

Some of the additions are:

Multi-tasking: Users will be able to press and hold the Back button to see minimised thumbnails of all their running apps, a view that will look very familiar to webOS and Blackberry PlayBook users. Like Android, but unlike iOS, there won’t be any restrictions on what apps can do in the background.

Unified Email Inboxes: Attention has also been paid to email. It’s now possible to set up multiple unified inboxes, such as one for your personal Hotmail and Gmail accounts and another for your Exchange accounts, keeping professional and personal separate.

Conversation Threads: Long text message and email conversations are now threaded in a conversation view that will be familiar to iPhone and PalmOS users. Like some Android apps, Mango will thread together conversations even if some of it takes place on different services, such as SMS, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

App Jumplist Search: Finding apps among a massive list can be a problem if you’ve installed a lot of them, so Microsoft is adding a jump list and a search function to its app menu. The former takes you to all apps that start with a given letter, and the latter is a traditional text search, with the option to jump into the Marketplace.

Internet Explorer 9: Currently, WP7 phones are running a version of IE Mobile, known as IE Mobile 7, which that is a variant of IE 7 with some IE 8 functionality added. But Windows Phone 7s running Mango will be running a mobile version of IE 9, Microsoft’s latest, HTML5-compliant IE browser.

 

To have an indepth look into all of the new features in the upcoming update preview the video below which shows how much Mango brings to Windows Phone 7.

Tags: 7, 7.1, 7.5, HTML5, IE9, microsoft, Multitasking, NoDo, Windows Phone, xbox live