Microsoft Mango Update Brings New Productivity to Phone Owners

Mango, the latest Windows Phone operating system by Microsoft, will formally be known as Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5. It has been getting positive reviews from industry experts. The latest review from CNET notes that Mango does an excellent job of providing benefits in three key areas: communications, new apps, and Internet use.

Launched eight months after its predecessor Windows Phone 7, Mango is bringing about 500 new features. Mango provides the following capabilities and more:

• Background processing
• New profiler and emulator for testing
• Use of Silverlight + XNA together
• Silverlight 4
• IE9 web browser control
• Live Tile enhancements: use of back of tiles and ability to update Live Tiles locally
• Deep linking into apps from notifications and Live Tiles
• Additional sensors; direct camera access, compass & gyro
• Fast application switching
• Networking / sockets for communications
• Local SQL database for structured storage
• Access to calendar and contacts for apps

As predicted by some major market research firms, such as Gartner and IDC, I can see how Windows Phone 7 will command a much higher market share than iPhone by 2015. The emphasis on consumers versus the traditional enterprise-oriented strategy by Microsoft seems to be working and doing wonders for the platform.  Mango Windows phone boasts cool new features such as Panoramic View, live tiles, Hubs, Linkedin and twitter integration, as well as Bing to name a few.

I have found it easy and simple to use the Windows Phone. The phone presents information in an elegant and simple manner without have to go through multiple clicks to get to the information you want. The design is based on the “Metro” design guidelines which help define the interaction design, motion design and the overall user experience.

To see the compelling user experience provided by the Metro UI, all you have to do is compare an application on Windows Phone against the same application on other platforms such as iPhone and Android. The difference is amazing.

Based on our experience in writing WP7 applications for Yelp, OpenTable, Intuit, Loopt and SoundTrckr amongst others, we can unequivocally say that the platform is well thought out and designed. For more information about the applications we have developed, click here.

With the news of the new Nokia-Microsoft partnership, one can expect the WP7 platform to grow even more. Microsoft will provide the much needed Marketing capabilities, Developer ecosystem and a lot of investment into platform innovation and improvement in User Experience.