Microsoft today showed off its upcoming Windows Phone Mango update. It promises hundreds of new features as it “takes a major step forward in redefining how people communicate and use apps and the Internet, giving you better results with less effort,” according to Andy Lees, president of Microsoft’s mobile communication business.
The update is focused on three areas: easier communications, smarter apps, and the Internet. Among these are the following:
- Threads. Switch between text, Facebook chat, and Windows Live Messenger within the same conversation.
- Groups. Group contacts into personalized Live Tiles to see the latest status updates and quickly send a text, email or IM to the whole group, right from the Start screen.
- Deeper social network integration. Twitter and Linked In feeds are now integrated into contact cards. There’s also built-in Facebook check-ins, and new face detection software that makes it easy to quickly tag photos and post to the web.
- Linked Inbox. See multiple email accounts in one linked inbox. Conversations are organized to make it easy to stay on top of the latest mail.
- Hands-free messaging. Built-in speech-to-text and text-to-speech support enables hands-free texting or chatting.
- Improved Live Tiles. Live Tiles are more dynamic and can hold more information—making it easier to get real-time info from apps without having to open them.
- Multitasking. Apps can now run in the background while preserving battery life and performance. You can also quickly switch between open apps.
- Internet Explorer 9 with support for HTML5 and hardware-accelerated graphics.
- Bing. Bing on Windows Phone offers more ways to search the web with voice and music search and Bing Vision, which uses your phone’s camera to look up product info.
- Local Scout. Provides hyper-local search results and recommends nearby restaurants, shopping and activities in an easy to use guide powered by Bing.
- Cards. Handy summaries of relevant info from Bing (including related apps) for products, movies, events or place you search for.
Mango will be available this fall. Despite evidence that it would be called Windows Phone 7.5, Microsoft did not confirm a version number at the event (although version 7.1 has been mentioned since).