Windows Phone Mango is the next big update to your Windows Phone 7 handset, and it’s coming this year. If you’re an HTC HD7 or HTC 7 Mozart owner, you can expect all sorts of juicy new features, switches and syncing options.
But just what exactly ins inside Windows Phone Mango? And how will it save you time? Read on and we’ll explain all…
Slick app switching
With the Windows Phone Mango update in place, you’ll be able to switch between every app you’re running, from email to several games on the go, and flick between them, no reloading required. Just hold down the back button on your Windows Phone, and every running app appears as a thumbnail in a row for you to choose: they’re live screenshots as well, not just static icons, so you can see exactly what you were doing in each.
Get chatty on Twitter
There’s already an official Windows Phone Twitter app, but the 140 character service gets even smarter in Mango, by hooking up to your friends’ individual contact cards. Sign in once, and whenever you open a friend from a homescreen tile or your address book, you can see exactly what they’re saying online – which could save you from an awkwardly timed call.
Easy messaging
Microsoft’s realised that in today’s connected age, conversations can spill across different platforms, and so it’s made it easy to carry these across seamlessly. Windows Phone Mango stores chats by person, so you can carry on talking to the same mate across SMS, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger, and everything will appear in order in just one chat window. Not only that, but Windows Phone Mango introduces new group tiles which you can pin to your start screen, letting you quickly contact all your friends in a set group.
Voice commands a gogo
The smartest smartphones don’t even need the screen to be on for you to control them. The Windows Phone Mango update allows you to use your voice to skip music tracks when your HTC HD7 is in your pocket, or even have it read out a text message to you with its text-to-voice transcription skills.
Souped up browsing
Internet Explorer 9 has only just been released for PCs, but already Microsoft’s ported it over to Windows Phone Mango. The brand new web browser on board now uses the phone’s graphics chips, typically reserved for 3D games, to load web pages on the double, and as you can see in the video above, it leaves competitors in the dust.
Cloud storage
While you get 8GB of storage built into the HTC 7 Mozart, and a whopping 16GB inside the HTC HD7, you can supplement that with oodles of free cloud storage on Windows Phone Mango too. Microsoft’s SkyDrive will simply appear as a folder on your phone whenever there’s a 3G connection, so you can save all your mobile Microsoft Office work in the cloud, and open it from any other internet-connected Windows Phone, PC, laptop or tablet.
The Windows Phone 7 Mango upgrade will be a free update later this year.