Today Microsoft held a conference for about 45-50 people, all about the new OS called mango otherwise known as 7.1.
Today we saw some of the new 500 new features that where shown off, Mango is said to make the smart phone smarter and easier, and they way to do this is to focus on 3 big things, communication, software and internet.
Smarter tiles have been added up front to give you more incite to what’s going on, also Twitter and LinkedIn is now built right in the OS and no need of a 3ed party app. Saying that they have updated the people hub, it scavenges all your social networks and grabs all your pictures and put them in one spot. They also added a BBM style messaging but better because it includes Live Messenger and Facebook chat.
The mail and calendar client have both been updated as well, the mail you can flag something as “Do not forward” and in calendar it syncs your Facebook calendar to, and so you never double schedule something. And you can do all this hands free with your voice.
For apps they showed off Pictures, Office, and Xbox hubs. In pictures you can take pictures and send them right to Facebook, and it has face detection for superfast tagging. Office has not changed much, still edits, you can pull stuff from the cloud, cool. In Xbox hubs you can jump in and out of games and not lose what you’re doing or your hours of progress, its set out to be a “really social Experience”.
IE 9 for phone regarded as “widely regarded as the leading desktop browser” my Micorsoft also said “tailor the web to your palm”. Searching on the web can also be done with your voice and is built right in to the OS its self. When lined up with BlackBerry Torch, iPhone 4, and the Droid Charge to render a HTML5 page it hits 30 FPS, well the torch hit 5FPS and the Chrage about 10FPS, the iPhone never started(tisk tisk).
Visual search is a big thing that was added to Mango, not longer do you have to type in what your searching for, just snap a picture and it will do the rest for you. If you can’t wait for this feature or any of the other ones that are coming out, you will have to wait till the summer is over, unless you’re a developer. But it will be worth the wait, since they have also got new hardware partners such as Acer, Fujitsu ZTE, and Nokia. On a Nokia note, they will have the the first consumer Mango phone. As normal, the Snapdragon will power this generation of the OS to.
EDIT: Mango also has built in Augmented Reality, using the internal gyro and accelerometer the device was able to overlay landmarks, although the History Channel app is the only one making use of this at this time.
