Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Windows Phone 7.1 Mango Webcast: The Crib Notes
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Windows Phone Events" @ 10:29 AM
I was eager to watch the Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) Webcast, and I figured taking point-form notes would be a great way to share with all of you what Microsoft presented. Here we go:
- Seven months ago, Windows Phone was launched
- Everything is people centric on Windows Phone; Mango ups the ante
- Twitter and LinkedIn now added into the mix
- They added photo albums via a pivot on the person
- Call History is sorted by person, including visual voicemails
- Groups: you can mirror your real-life relationships on the phone. This feature looks killer! It filters all your social networks just for those people, including photos that are tagged with those people. Group email, group texts - Microsoft didn't want to take a proprietary approach like Blackberry Messenger; they used Windows Live and Facebook Chat instead.
- Predictive text goes to the phrases level; "Happy b" will show you "birthday" as the next word
- Groups can be pinned to the home screen
- Threads is a way to pull together all the communication, regardless of what service you're using; Facebook chat messages come to your phone, and if the person isn't on Facebook any more, the phone will route your reply to text
- Email inboxes can be linked together; so you can have a unified inbox for Gmail and Hotmail for personal use, but a separate inbox for your work email. This is superb and a big improvement over what other phones do
- Email conversation view with message threading
- Information management tools mean certain emails can't be forwarded
- Meeting requests have been enhanced; it checks availability in the message, and will take you to that day on your calendar to help you plan better
- Facebook Events are now supported in the Calendar app
- While playing music, if a text comes in, and it will read the text out to you, and you can reply with your voice, and send the message, all without touching the phone. This is superb and finally pulls in the voice recognition assets that Microsoft has in a meaningful way
- Andy Lees put the smackdown on the app-centred approach...Windows Phone 7.1 takes it a step further
- New versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel? Cool, I wonder what they added
- Pictures need to be a people-centred experience. I'm really not very impressed with how many taps it takes me to get to pictures that I care about, so I hope they've streamlined this
- Automatic face detection when the photo is uploaded to Facebook
- Office Hub connects to Office 365 now. I wonder if the SkyDrive experience has been improved?
- Xbox Live Hub has been completely re-designed in Mango
- Derek Snyder demoed "Rise of Glory" game; he got a text, looked at it, and instantly resumed the game...it was stupid-fast.
- Pressing and holding the back button triggers the multitasking UI allowing you to pop back and forth
- 3D animated Xbox Live avatar is now standard
- You can check out what your friends are playing, what their gamer scores are, etc.
- Demo of a British Airways app looked amazing; for frequent travellers this would be a huge boon. It featured the boarding pass, seat selection, food selection, movie selection, etc. The boarding pass is on the home screen tile; you can pin a specific screen from an app to the home screen
- IE9: Bing is deeply integrated to help you find, decide, and take action based on location, sensors, social, and apps. More than just "blue link hunting".
- Windows Phone 7.1 slams the speed reading test at 28fps, the iPhone didn't even start the test - hardware acceleration on the phone allows apps to
- Searching for "Water for Elephants" immediately gives the showtime for the closest theatre instead of links
- App Connect allows Bing searches to be handed off to an app; the "Water for Elephants" search hands off the results to the IMDB app
- Searches are understood as local searches so it immediately shows you the local results first
- Local Scout allows you to "live like a local"; see what there is to eat and drink, see and do, shop, favourite places from that area
- Indoor Maps for a mall and other public locations from Bing; you can view multiple levels of a mall right on the phone
- Shows you what's going on at a venue; Madison Square Garden shows not only hours of operation, it pulls in the events that are coming up - taking information from the Web, presenting it as a card, and allowing you to act on the results
- With Mango, Bing Vision is added: you scan a book, a QR code, etc. and it shows prices, reviews, and apps that sell the item (Amazon, Best Buy, Kindle). This was an amazing demo: he identified a book, it handed off to the Kindle app, and a few seconds later he was reading a sample or buying it
- Over 18,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace
- Developer "Mango Tools" are available today
- This is all coming in the fall of this year as a free upgrade - do I ever hope that
- There will be a Skype app coming to Windows Phone in the fall
- There will be a "lot more geographies" when Mango comes out; lower priced phones. The addressable market for Mango is 4x bigger than before
- New phones will be coming out when Mango is released; they've enabled "more differentiation"
- Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE will be releasing phones in the Mango timeframe
- Nokia sold more than 400 million phones in the past 12 months
- They have Nokia phone running Mango in the Microsoft labs today
- Windows Phone 7.1 will be what Nokia uses when they release their phones...but Andy Lees didn't say when that would be. I'd guess they're pushing for the holiday season but might not make it, so they don't want to make any promises
