Tech Blog

[#1]

Windows Phone 7 has only been on the market for seven months, but there has been a bit of flurry of news about its future over the last few months. First, came the marriage with Nokia that would put WP7 on Nokia’s future smartphones. And now, the biggest single update for the mobile operating system with 500 new features, affectionately codenamed “Mango”.

Mango was unveiled in a Microsoft keynote earlier today that was streamed live on Microsoft’s website. I was at a media event for it in Toronto, where unfortunate technical difficulties left us wondering what was even said in the first two-thirds of the keynote. It was at least some consolation that the same glitch had afflicted other media gatherings in other cities around the world, too.

The initial hype is in the number 500. That’s the number of new features Mango is going to offer, but a majority of these are probably little tweaks and additions that you either may not notice or care about. The ones that do stand out, however, are Threads, Groups, social network integration, linked inbox, multitasking and a fully-featured Internet Explorer 9 browser.

Threads basically allows users to switch seamlessly between texting, Facebook chat and Windows Live Messenger. Contact cards will now have Twitter and LinkedIn accounts integrated. And the linked inbox just aggregates multiple email accounts into one box.

Multitasking is pretty straightforward. Hold the back button on the phone (which I found to be pretty unresponsive on the prototype build we were shown) and you can see all the apps you have open. Third-party apps will be able to work in the background with Mango, too. The Live Tiles on the main home screen are nice, but real-time updates have pretty much only been on the core Microsoft-developed apps. Mango takes that further and makes it happen for third-party ones as well.

Quick Cards is another interesting feature where you can take a photo of a product and then have information about it sent to you in real-time. And then there’s the IE9 browser with full HTML5 support.

What’s glaringly missing from all this is universal search. Not only was it never mentioned, but I’ve seen nothing about it in the list of new features. This was already a big omission from WP7’s initial launch, so its absence would be puzzling here, to say the least.

As for apps, Windows Marketplace currently has 18,000 available, with about 100 being added each day. No mention of when or how Skype will integrate with the phone, now that Microsoft plunked down all that cash to own it.

The other curious point here is that the announcement is being made months before Mango will even be ready for primetime. The earliest we’ll see Mango is in the fall, though no exact date or timeframe has been set yet.

For more info on Mango, you can check out the blog they’ve set up here.