New Windows Phone ‘Mango’ features revealed

By on May 9, 2011 at 8:00 AM
mobile May 9, 2011

Several new features set to be introduced in Microsoft’s upcoming “Mango” update for Windows Phone were revealed this past weekend. We already knew that Mango is set to be a major update to the Windows Phone platform — perhaps the most anticipated new feature is improved multitasking support — but Microsoft had been keeping several upcoming additions under wraps. Newly revealed features include Bing Audio, which will identify songs by listening to music, a la Shazam; Bing Vision, which will provide barcode scanning along with a host of camera-assisted search functions; the addition of turn-by-turn navigation to Bing Maps; speech recognition support in the messaging app; and a new native podcast player. None of these new features have been confirmed by Microsoft at this point but considering the proven track record of the source, it looks like Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 update is going to be even more exciting than we thought.

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  • Anonymous

    And all the hater boys start bashing now i guess. WP7 is looking better any better, now once they start pushing phones with hardware comparable to the other companies i will probably be jumping ship…i say probably because these Tegra Apps on my Atrix are SWEET!!!

    • http://www.droiddoes.com/ Norm

      Tegra apps? WTF?

      • http://twitter.com/mfg68 MFG

        Probably from Tegra Zone.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=546510157 Mike Greco

      I had the Atrix.. jumped ship for the Focus and never looked back.

  • http://about.me/brandonmccall brandonmccall

    That’s hot.

  • Anonymous

    Free turn by turn nav in Bing Maps, sweet!! Maybe RIM didn’t screw up by jumping in bed with MS.

  • http://twitter.com/avr73 Al Rodriguez

    I like how MSFT integrates popular features directly into the phone rather than requiring you to find and download a separate program. Their marketing campaign for WP7 should be “You don’t need an app for that”

    • Anonymous

      It’s more like “Even if you did need an app for that, there wouldn’t be one anyway,so why bother?”

  • Red

    Can we say NOKIA influenced!!!!

    • serpentor

      It’s more than an influence. Part of Nokia using WP7&8 is MS would use Nokia maps.

  • Brandon

    Sahweet. Now just gotta get my @VerizonWireless #wp7 – c’mon #htc #trophy!

  • Eddie

    I hope WM finally has Wifi Tethering, then I am sold.

    • Ajay1234

      It Does work for me :)

  • Anonymous

    So MS bringout a half assed phone without the features of current gen phones. Few months later, the add the BASIC stuff like c&p, multitasking and everyone starts to party? It’s still only te basic stuff, all androids, current gen iPhones, etc have had them before. Where’ the innovation?

    • serpentor

      Don’t blame MS. iPhone created the phenomena of celebrating basic features. c&p was added to iOS in 2009; not-true-multitasking in 2010. WP7 only came out a couple months later w/o multitasking and retards were like, “FAIL”. Seems like people can’t keep a memory longer than 6 months.

      A sidekick could do all that in 2001.

      • Anonymous

        Translation: “I really have no explanation for why MS is selling a ridiculous low 100K phones a month, and when I lack an explanation for a tech company’s failures, I blame Apple. If it’s Apple that fails, I blame Steve Jobs. Oh, and I want my mommy.”

    • Hank

      There has been no innovation in almost 6 years really. Not by Apple not by any phone they all are using the same thing in a different form. With that being said I like they direction WP7 is going not needing all the apps to do things. The need for apps feel to me as if the company is saying we don’t really want to do the work to make this phone awesome so we will pay others to help us. Lazy give me a phone that does all the basic stuff without finding it in an app store or appstore or marketplace.

      • serpentor

        You mean to say, ‘devs PAY APPLE’ to make iOS do basic things.

      • Anonymous

        eh? what’s basic to me isn’t what’s basic to you. Give me a built in cumulative interest calculator…

        fer god’s sake.

        by your argument, you should just go by a Nokia featurephone.

        apps are the best thing to come out of cellphone development. It’s customization via apps. Because WP7 apps aren’t critical mass, adding these app level features not only differentiates the wp7 platform but also something to laud as a feature advantage.

        The caveat emptor here is “critical mass”.

        Metro may never have application critical mass. check the dev forums. it’s pretty much a 2 horse race. The nokia app folks arent’ migrating to microsoft.

  • Peter

    Bing is great for features but awful for them actually working well. Bing Maps are a joke (internationally especially) and Bing search just isn’t as good as Google, its ok just not great. Considering none of these features are actually out yet I guess I’ll just wait and see, I’ll give em’ a try but really Google has invested way more in search/audio/visual/mapping they are the best at it. Microsoft makes operating systems, they are good at it, but they are not good at search, they even copy Google’s results, they are good at marketing Bing, just not good at executing Bing.

    • http://www.twitter.com/wixostrix WixosTrix

      You just relinquished your credibility in the last sentence about Bing copying Google results. I agree, Bing Maps is not as full featured as Google Maps, espciailly on mobile. But with Ovi Maps from Nokia, we will see a huge leap for Bing Maps. Bing maps already has subtle things that are nice, like including landmarks and business to look out for in the directions and letting you know the last intersection you will cross before arriving to your destination. We’ll see how well the mobile Bing competes when Mango is released. On the desktop it’s great (in the US).

    • http://jimramk.tumblr.com JRK

      I disagree with one point and that is audio. Microsoft has some of the best audio recognition software that I’ve tried in a phone. It’s far more accurate than Google voice IMO and one of the things they did right. I hope Bing maps integrates Ovid maps data though.

  • http://www.facebook.com/joshua.nwankwo Joshua Nwankwo

    Mango update is looking very tasty! WP7 should have launched with such features.

  • Anonymous

    This OS is going to be great if MS can deliver what they promise. I wonder what feature they plan on adding that requires dual core processors. The OS is fast as hell already.

    • http://jimramk.tumblr.com JRK

      Probably better games that’s about it.

  • Anonymous

    This should have been there since day 0.

  • Matthew

    pretty cool hopefully the update will go smoother than their current NODO update that we are hearing about.

  • Anonymous

    They are getting close to making it something I want to move back to using. I really enjoyed my HD7 but the browser was lacking and there was not really any turn by turn direction without exiting the Maps application and going ot Telenav to type everything in again…this is not sometihing i want to try to manage while also driving. Some may say that I shouldn’t mess with it while in the car but when using the phone for navigation this WILL happen. It might as well be as quick and easy as possible.

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