The second most important set of Mango additions centers on Bing, Microsoft's search engine, which has gained a bunch of new features. To begin with, the new Local Scout feature integrates into Bing Maps and shows a variety of local information, including places to eat, drink and shop, as well as local attractions and events. It grabs that information from a variety of partners such as Yelp. Overall, Local Scout is a nifty addition, but it's only as good as the partner information, which is not always stellar.
Restaurant information wasn't comprehensive; in my neighborhood, for example, it left out several of the best restaurants and most interesting stores. As for local things to see and do, it included events well over an hour's drive away, which may not fit everyone's idea of local. And I found the recommendations in its "highlights" section, which are supposed to list the most interesting places and things to do, downright strange at times -- for example, it listed a nearby burrito joint as one of the top three attractions in my vicinity.
Note to Local Scout: My neighborhood is a whole lot more interesting than that. I found the results to be hit-and-miss. It was able to identify the wireless Sonos 3 music system from a bar code, for example, but got the pricing wrong. Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here.
Twitter integration seems pretty excellent too: You'll get notifications when you're mentioned or receive DMs and people's Twitter status will get pushed to their Live Tiles on your homescreen, for instance. 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. You can also collate two personal email accounts and leave work in its own app, for instance.
Same for Calendars, which now supports Facebook events. All good, all things it should be doing. Multitasking looks solid, but also exactly what you'd expect: Apps "hydrate" and "rehydrate" for fast resuming, and when you want to switch quickly, it switches to a webOS-like card view albeit, uglier with that massive background.
Microsoft's Andy Lees explained it as a hybrid of every other phone multitasking model: The way apps go into the background and resume is like iOS, but the visual representation is like webOS's card view, while developers are allowed slightly more freedom to run "arbitrary bits of code" to do things in the background. Other new app stuff: Developers can mix XNA and Silverlight, meaning run-of-the-mill apps like one for British Airways can now do crazy 3D stuff, like take you on a tour of the plane.
App Shortcuts like the Bing-to-instant-Kindleage will let you dive directly to a certain part of the app from a tile, like your boarding pass. A voice demo Microsoft showed off is pretty cool—receiving 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 to be beamed away.
You've got Office working better, with deeper SkyDrive cloud integration. The Xbox Live hub is redesigned, with more legit Live features—full Avatars and accessories, easy comparisons with your friends' Gamerscores.
If only FPS in a speedtest demo directly translated to awesome browsing experiences on phones. They don't. It could be great, though! Microsoft says what they showed today is only a small slice of what's new in Mango. Everything Microsoft did show was slick and genuinely thoughtful. Pretty cool. Visual search is sort of like Google Goggles , built right into the Windows Phone platform.
You can take a picture of a book cover and Bing will not only search for reviews, prices and more information about the book, but will also show information from your apps, using App Connect. Microsoft is also diving into augmented reality by providing new motion and camera APIs to developers. Microsoft is aiming to make Windows Phone the phone for business customers. For example, Windows Phone 7 owners will be able to save and share Office documents through Office and Windows Live SkyDrive, ensuring you have access to the latest documents when and where you need them.
For example, you can pin a specific folder for a project or from a specific group or person. You can also pin an RSS feed from Outlook. Emails will be organized by conversation, so replies to a thread will be a consolidated into a single view you can more easily follow. Business users will appreciate the ability to search e-mail servers, like the Exchange Server, for older emails no longer stored on your phone.
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