There’s a lot of talk about the impending update to Windows Phone 7. There’s a lot of rumor, and some information that’s been released from Microsoft. See official news here: http://bit.ly/otnlB1 . See some other feature lists here: http://dthin.gs/jYAoZA and here: http://huff.to/lPe1of. We wanted to list out some of our favorite new features we think will be in Mango.
Access to the accelerometer, gyro, compass in the new Motion API. This makes it easy for app developers to get information about movement and location in a unified fashion without requiring any geometry calculations to make sense of the raw numbers.
Direct access to the Camera’s video stream. This allows apps to show overlays, take periodic snapshots, or even combine the video with real-time location information. This finally gives Windows Phone apps augmented reality capability.
The long list of apps on the Start screen can finally be tamed! Apps are grouped by first letter like phone contacts, and there’s a search button for finding by name. Developers will love that if a search comes up empty, the user can click a direct link to repeat their search on Marketplace.
Twitter integration. ‘Nuff said.
Further Facebook Integration including always-on chat capabilities that can easily switch between SMS and Facebook. Video uploads to Facebook (or email) are included. By release, it’s rumored that Facebook location check-ins will be supported too.
Users can now choose to merge email inboxes to create a unified inbox. This is completely optional and can include only the accounts that they want merged.
Applications can now expose dashboard-style information on the Live Tile screen without using external web services. Not only can apps directly update their own Live Tile, but there can be more than one Live Tile per app.
Multitasking. Microsoft has implemented multitasking in a somewhat novel way. There’s the ability to hold down the Back button to see the previous few apps and bring them back. These may or may not be actually running in the background, but at the least, they come back quickly using Fast App Resume. Apps can also schedule background work to be performed, or allow it to be invoked during idle time when the phone is charging. This could allow a news app to download headlines periodically so the app is always ready. Other tasks such as background music streaming or data uploads and downloads can be run in the background independent of the app itself. Since apps don’t have total control of the phone when run in the background, and Windows Phone itself schedules these tasks, it’s expected that there will be minimal impact on battery life.
And, of course, Internet Explorer 9.
Posted Monday, July 11th, 2011 at 9:32 am by Bob Carver
Tags: Mango, Mobile, Phone, Windows Phone 7
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