By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
Boasting '500 new features' the upcoming update to Windows Phone 7 (version 7.1 codenamed Mango) was announced yesterday for a Fall release. Aside from tooting the horn for an OS upgrade that's overdue and is months away, Microsoft did provide a compelling sneak-peak at where they're headed in this space. We discuss what we find interesting about this development.
New Partners
At a downtown Toronto V.I.P. event yesterday, which served to get reporters in a room together to watch a live streamed webcast of the launch, expectations ran high that this new version would be available right away.
But, it seems, delays were the order of the day. Mango speculation seemed to float from a Summer release to a Fall release and the webcast itself ran into some global technical issues so we missed the good parts. So much for that.
One of the big announcements that we found exciting was the addition of three new handset makers for Windows Phone. Acer, Fujitsu and ZTE corp. just joined giant Nokia as well as incumbent WP7 makers Samsung, LG, Asus and HTC which gives Microsoft a stable of handsets to work with. It will be interesting to see the variants and form factors the hardware will take, but for our money, we expect the first Nokia handsets to be the most impressive overall specially if they are anything like the recent N8 and X7 smartphones.
What Microsoft needs to do is sell a range of smartphones from the $250 to $600 range (without contract) that offers users some choice in terms of features and functionality that transcends beyond slide out speakers or keyboards. Call Android as fragmented as you like, but they have everything from cheap, almost glorified feature phone models up to handheld computers like the Nexus S and the Motorola ATRIX.
But, hurry up Microsoft, get to it now while Google is distracted by making tablets!
Software surprises
Windows Phone 7 remains one of our favourite operating systems just because it is so simple to use and so utterly predictable and not having to manage resources or continously quit background applications made smartphone-ing with it a lot more convenient. For Mango, Microsoft has pushed this simplicity even further but has also made Windows Phones smarter, more user-focused and with better AI (artificial intelligence).
The App Connect feature integrates search results with applications, media (movies, music, pictures) which makes search smarter. The improved Live Tiles will also go beyond the pretty and serve some real-time functionality even if the apps they correspond to aren't open. Multitasking finally makes an appearance as well which makes it possible to quickly switch between apps as needed
Better search implementation is impressive, including Bing Vision (take photos of bar codes, QR codes, book and CD covers and Bing will find info of subject), Music Search (a Shazam like audio search function) and Voice Search uses spoken word commands to find stuff.
There is a lot more to Mango but we haven't had time to play with it at length or process how everything fits in together. We're waiting on something big like Skype integration and video chat capabilities, more cloud-connected SkyDrive powered media playback capabilities and frankly, more and better apps for WP7.
Still, there's a lot to be excited about if you're a WP7 user or plan to be sometime in the Fall. It should be interesting to see how the competition responds to these announcements.