All the Best New Features in Windows Phone Mango

This is the new Windows Phone, Mango—with 500 new features, according to Steve Ballmer. Crazy things, like multitasking! And other exciting stuff. But it's not coming until this Fall.

Microsoft demoed a handful of the "500" new features Ballmer promised for Mango. First up, Groups. Groups is kind of like bookmarks for people, or like a buddy list. It'll let you filter all the social networking stuff for a particular group of people, so you can focus on the 4 or 10 people you actually care about. And it's got integrated group chat, through Facebook chat or Windows Live Messenger. (Microsoft compares it to BBM.) Also, there's now threading across services, a lot like webOS—you can start a conversation in SMS and pick it up in Facebook chat. You can (ugh, finally) bring all of your email accounts together in one view too—and there's full message threading, which looks pretty decent. Same for Calendars, which now supports Facebook events. Oh, and People now has Twitter. All good, all things it should be doing.

The voice demo is pretty cool—you receive a text message while listening to music, the phone read out the message, and he was able to simply speak the reply, which the phone translated to text just like the voice to text feature of windows.

Office works better, with deeper SkyDrive integration. And the Xbox Live hub is redesigned, with more legit Live features—full Avatars and accessories, easy comparisons with your friend's Gamerscores.

Multitasking looks solid, but also exactly what you'd expect: Apps "hydrate" and "rehydrate" for fast resuming (like iOS and Android), and when you want to switch quickly, it switches to a webOS-like card view (albeit, uglier). Other new app stuff: Developers can mix XNA and Silverlight, meaning run-of-the-mill apps like one for British Airways can do crazy 3D stuff, like take you on a tour of the plane. App shortcuts (another airplane app example) will let you dive directly to a certain part of the app from a tile, like your boarding pass.

Things are getting real —to show much better Windows Phone is at the internet with Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft's got a BlackBerry Torch, Samsung Charge (Android) and iPhone 4 up there. In this speedtest, BlackBerry's got 4FPS, iPhone hasn't loaded, Charge is doing 10FPS, and WP's got 27FPS.

"Bing is not an app, it's an integrated social experience." Quick Card turns a search for Water for Elephants (a movie) from a pile of links to a neat compilation of the relevant info, based on time and location—nearby showtimes, reviews, etc. It also includes things like an indoor map for a mall, and a list of upcoming events in the entry for Marina Club Karachi. (This is really cool. It's how search should be.)

Local Scout is a new part of Bing that's like Yelp or Google Places but not shitty looking—it shows you stuff to "see + do" in a neighborhood. Microsoft's pitching it as letting you "live like a local." Visual search is what you'd expect—it scans book covers, QR codes, DVDs—and then for a book, it'll take you to a neat list of prices, reviews and the like. In the Selena Gomez demo, shot the cover, he checked out reviews, and with App Shortcuts, was able to instantly jump into the Kindle app to buy and read it. And that's it for the demos.
Naturally, 4G phones are coming from Samsung, LG and HTC. Nokia Windows Phones will launch with Mango.

Everything Microsoft showed off? Really slick and thoughtful. It's also, fundamentally, stuff Windows Phone simply should be doing. It puts Windows Phone on very nearly equal ground with everybody else. But we're talking about features that are literally months away, Microsoft could again be catching up to what's already been done. We'll know in a couple next weeks.

Here's the official Microsoft rundown

Posted in: WindowsPhone