Nutty Mobiles

Windows Phone 7 is set to undergo a major update with the launch of the new Mango version of the operating system, and TechRadar was present to get its paws all over the new software.

The good news is that the new Mango update brings features rather than massive UI enhancements – we’re big fans of the Live Tiles and side-swiping to get to the menu, so it’s good to know that’s still all present and correct.

However, the better news is that with a large range of APIs now opened up by Microsoft, Mango will bring the opportunity for developers to have much more information showing on the Live Tiles than ever before.

Our colleagues at T3.com grabbed some Windows Phone Mango video footage of the new OS in action, so check it out below:

This means things such as the BA app will now have the exact arrival time of your next flight constantly updated on the home screen, or football scores that keep you up to date at all times, finally bringing Microsoft’s ‘glancing for info’ ethos to life on its phone OS.

However, we were a little bit upset that there was nothing new to help organise the list of applications on the right-hand side of the home screen – if you’ve downloaded a few applications you still need to scroll down for a few seconds to get to the bottom, unfortunately.

The People app is probably the one with the widest changes – now you can combine specific groups of people to make it easy to track and communicate with them.

It’s not a new trick by any stretch of the imagination, but what Microsoft has done well here is allow you to see all their Facebook and Twitter notifications at once, which is jolly handy.

Yes, you read that right: Twitter integration now comes as standard (as does LinkedIn) to make it that much easier to communicate with your buddies and see what they’re up to without having to resort to a dedicated application.

It’s really handy to be able to see all the social networking updates and pictures of groups, as you can drill down to the people you care about with no worries about seeing things from those you ‘have’ to follow.

Messaging has been given a similar overhaul, with the addition of threads in both standard SMS and email conversations making it much easier to track what’s been said with whom.

With Windows Live Messenger and Facebook Chat also on offer, you can seamlessly jump from one method of communicating to another – we tested this out and it really did work nicely.

The chances of needing to use all three consecutively are pretty minimal, but being able to see who’s online at any time is pretty nifty and works in a better way than the same system on HP’s webOS.

Another big plus on Windows Phone 7 Mango is the addition of ‘multitasking’. We use inverted commas as it’s not the complete offering, with the apps heading to a hibernating state when not running in the foreground.

While this might upset some purists, for battery life this is the optimum strategy, and doesn’t impact performance from where we’re standing. Simply holding the Back key opens up the tiled view of running apps, and jumping between them is very easy, via a simple scroll left and right.

Microsoft says users don’t need to shut down applications because the phone handles app management so well – this will probably cause jitters, with some users thinking their battery is being drained, but we’re promised it’s going to work just fine…

Compare this to the endless ‘Resuming’ messages from the first iteration of the software, and it’s a massive improvement – despite the fact the UI looks like something from the late 1990s.

The Bing search integration has been overhauled too, with the addition of Bing Vision (Google Goggles Microsoft-style), Music (which is very similar in functionality to Shazam) and Bing Voice, which uses cloud computing to work out what you’re saying and what you want to search for.

Location-based searching has been enhanced too, with the addition of See+Do bringing a simplistic version of, say, Lonely Planet to your phone by suggesting local attractions.

Bing also scrapes the internet to find nearby places to eat and drink, with the now-standard information on offer of websites, phone numbers and ratings based on aggregating public sites.

Microsoft is claiming to have shoved a pretty much complete version of Internet Explorer 9 on its Windows Phone 7 devices as part of the Mango upgrade, offering speedy browsing and HTML5 inclusion.

We pushed and pushed Eric Hermelee, Microsoft’s Head of Mobile, UK, for an answer on why Flash wasn’t included, but all we got was a repeated answer of “Microsoft is working on a standards-based approach” with no explicit reason why Flash isn’t on offer.

Websites didn’t really load that much faster in our eyes, but then again we were beholden to some pretty shonky signal during the test – we’ll look forward to checking this out during our full Windows Phone 7 Mango review.

Office, which was already one of the highlights of the Windows Phone 7 range before, is supplemented by Office 365 and SkyDrive, offering 25GB of storage in the cloud for anyone looking to sync documents on the go.

The integration of the Office Suite is even more pronounced than before, with Excel ability to create formulas and PowerPoint offering improved animation between slides – so if you’re into that kind of thing then it’ll be a real boon for you workie-types.

The rest of the changes appear to be more about making the phone easier to use, through a larger music control widget on the lock screen and an enhanced UI from the volume control.

The main improvements, however, are not with the phone itself but with the APIs Microsoft is letting developers play with. From Live Tiles to Compass to Maps to the camera application, developers will be able to improve the quality of their applications immeasurably, meaning a richer ecosystem for users.

So hopefully Mango will be more than just a feature-rich update – Microsoft is eyeing third place in the application market and more APIs are imperative if it’s to have any hope of nabbing it. The Windows Phone 7 Mango update is coming to all phones in the range so far, so all you HD7, Omnia 7 and even Venue Pro owners can rest easy.