Eight reasons why Mango tastes so good

The new update includes a swathe of new features designed to catch up with, and surpass, competitors in the smartphone market.

Why does Mango taste so good? Let me count the ways…

1. Live Tiles. Windows Phone uses a unique tile-based layout on the home screen. Tiles provide you with “glance and go” information, showing you everything from unread message counts to Facebook updates. Developers can now create additional tiles for applications which take you straight to the information you need.
2. Advanced Multi-tasking. Microsoft has worked hard to combine the functionality of background processing with the battery life and performance we expect from our phones. The result in Mango is a rich background processing framework which allows developers to offload tasks like large downloads and status updates to the operating system.
3. New Hardware Features. The new Mango hardware specification adds faster processors, better 3D graphics, and a sensitive gyroscope to the Windows Phone hardware. With new phones coming from Nokia, Samsung, HTC and others, there’ll be plenty of sexy hardware available by the end of 2011. But wait: if you already have a Windows Phone, Mango will work perfectly on your device too. Microsoft has promised the software update will be available for all existing hardware.
4. Internet Explorer 9. Using the same underlying engine as Microsoft’s flagship desktop web browser, Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Phone brings HTML5 compatibility and blazing-fast Javascript performance to the phone.
5. Social Integration. Windows Live, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are seamlessly linked to your contacts and updates in Windows Phone Mango. Viewing a contact with linked social information will show you their Facebook updates, photo uploads, and phone history (calls, text messages, emails and everything else in one list). If that’s not enough, when communicating with a friend, it’s super-simple to switch between communication modes on the fly.
6. Contact Groups. Take the social networking features mentioned above, add in calls and text messages, then link them all together with contact groups. Click on your “Family” group tile, and you’ll see recent status updates, photos, and communications from that group. Hit one button to send a group email or text message to all the group members.
7. Bing Audio and Bing Vision. Hold your phone up to a music source and Bing Audio will identify it for you. Likewise, show Bing Vision some text or a bar code using the integrated camera on your Windows Phone, and Bing Vision will recognise the text (or bar code, or QR code).
8. Xbox Live Updates. With the Mango update, Windows Phone cements its place as the phone to have for gamers. The Xbox hub is completely redesigned, bringing your Xbox avatar, friends, games and achievements to the fore.

Overall, Microsoft has added in the order of 500 new features and 1,500 new developer APIs to Mango, so whichever way you look at it, it’s one heck of a juicy update.

ben.gracewood@intergen.co.nz