There’s no new hardware to talk about — yet — but we’ve got a Samsung Focus here with Mango loaded, so it’s time to dig in and see what’s changed, what’s good, and what needs improvement.Remember: this isn’t a final build, and pretty much everything you read here is subject to change (hopefully for the better) by the time you’ve got a retail Mango device in your hands.Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s have a look at how far we’ve come since 7.0.
People
The bulk of the People hub (and contact management in general) carries over from Windows Phone 7, and if you ask me, that’s just fine — I thought it was already attractive and plenty functional from the start. In fact, you can broaden at least part of that statement: as a whole, Windows Phone 7 as it stands today is exceptionally attractive. And needless to say, the so-called Metro UI isn’t going anywhere — Mango’s more about plugging a few holes that Microsoft didn’t have time to fill for last fall’s launch and expanding in a few creative directions that its competitors haven’t, not about refreshing the look and feel.
Otherwise, the headline feature in Mango’s People hub is the addition of Groups, which simply allow you to group contacts together. As you might expect, doing this unlocks a fair bit of magic: your created groups each effectively get their own hubs that appear at the top of the All pivot in the main People hub, right above the list of all your contacts. Inside, you’ve got a tile for each member of the group — these look and behave the same way as they would on the home screen, which means that dynamic updates from Facebook and other services will appear (though I had the same bugs here that I mentioned before). Below, you’ve got mass communication options, Text and Send Email, each labeled with the number of group members that have the information necessary to participate in that form of communication. For instance, I’ve got a group of three contacts and only two have phone numbers associated with them, so the Text option reads “2 of 3 members” to let me know that not everyone will be involved. You’ve also got a What’s New pivot that aggregates status updates from members of the group — which you can reply to directly from this screen — and a Pictures pivot. I found the layout and behavior of this particular screen a little odd. There’s a box at the top labeled “Pictures of [group name]” that gives you quick access to aggregated pictures of the group’s members, but there’s no way to get to an aggregation of their albums — instead, that’s broken down in a list below, one menu item to jump out to each member’s albums individually. Considering how aggregated and unified everything else is here, that seems like a strange omission.
Email and calendar
Mango’s email client looks largely the same as before, but it’s got a few new tricks up its sleeve. First up, there’s a fairly well-implemented conversation view that groups threads together — you can visually distinguish them from singleton emails by virtue of an indent and vertical gray bar in the message preview beneath the subject line. By default they’re collapsed; a single tap expands them out to reveal all the emails in the thread. The functionality also allows group message management: tapping and holding on a collapsed thread lets you delete, move, flag, or toggle the read status on all the contained messages at once. As with many (if not most) other threaded email implementations I’ve seen, it’s pretty easy to fool the app if you’ve got multiple unrelated messages with the same subject line — they’ll all show up grouped together. That’s not a huge deal but for one exception: emails with blank subject lines, which I think most of us get every once in a while. I sent myself a test email without a subject, and when it showed up on the phone, it immediately became threaded in with dozens of old subject-less emails floating in my inbox. It seems like Microsoft’s quick fix there is simply to disable threads for emails without subjects. (Oh, and if you’re not into threaded email views at all, no worries — you can disable it completely from the app’s settings.)
The other big news in the Calendar app is support for multiple calendars per Exchange ActiveSync account. I personally use multiple calendars extensively in my Gmail and Google Apps accounts, so I was particularly stoked to hear this — unfortunately, though, Google’s actively blocking Windows Phone users from selecting more than one calendar on Google Sync. Actually, I was totally unable to get to Google Sync settings from the phone’s browser, but when I tricked it into loading on my PC using an iPhone user agent, it recognized that I had synchronized with a Windows Phone and limited the total number of calendars selected to one. My hope is that Google will get this patched up by the time Mango launches, but I wouldn’t hold my breath — Google’s been spotty in the past about improving Sync in a timely fashion.
Messaging
That said, the functionality that’s here works simply and ably. For each active messaging thread that you’ve got going with a contact, the top of the screen indicates the service you’re currently using — Text, Messenger, and so on — and as you (or your contact) change services along the way, a small note appears between chat bubbles to let you know that the change has occurred. A new button at the bottom of the screen lets you change services on the fly; if you’ve only got one service available for a given contact, the button won’t appear.
Speaking of changing services, I did run into a couple speed bumps along the way. First — and I’m assuming this won’t be a problem for the overwhelming majority of users — you can’t add multiple Windows Live Messenger accounts to a single contact. If you try, you’ll get an error. Unfortunately, this means that if you’ve got friends in this situation, they’ll need to live as two separate contacts in your People hub, which is counterintuitive and confusing. Second, there’s no way to link Windows Live Messenger contacts from the Messaging app itself, so I found that I needed to visit the People hub an awful lot to get everything working correctly (linking is critical to unifying the messaging). Fortunately, this is a one-time problem — link it and you’ll never need to worry about it again, so it’s really only going to be an issue for the first few days you’ve got the phone.
Voice search was already prominently integrated into Windows Phone from day one, but voice generally takes on a bigger role in Mango — and one of the places you’ll notice that is in messaging. A microphone button at the bottom of every thread lets you dictate your SMS or IM, and it’s quick — the phone will announce “say your message!” in a synthesized voice within about a half second of initiating the function, then you just start talking. I had about 50 percent success with it in a quiet room using common words and phrases; as for proper nouns, I figured it might be smart enough to deduce the names of my contacts, but I didn’t have much luck there. Funnily enough, I found that the speech-to-text was either dead on or completely wrong, there was very little in between. I imagine the accuracy of this will vary a bit from phone model to model with the quality and position of the microphone, but on the Focus, I think I’d generally avoid it.
Multitasking
Microsoft says that Mango has significantly improved support for app backgrounding baked in — but for the moment, there’s very little evidence of that apart from the thumbnail view (more on that in a moment). Why’s that? Taking full advantage of the new capabilities required that apps be modified to support them, and… well, that’s going to take some time. The good news is that Microsoft’s given developers plenty of lead time with Mango development tools before retail deployment, so I suspect this won’t be much of an issue for consumers upgrading their existing phones or rushing out to buy new Mango hardware this fall… it’s just an issue for us while we’re running through the pre-release build. For example, one of the big use cases Microsoft has been touting is that you’ll be able to switch out of games to take a call or respond to a text message then switch back and pick up where you left off, but that feature doesn’t “just work” with existing games. I tried with Doodle Jump, but returning to the game after backgrounding it kicked me out first to the “Loading” screen, then the main menu — just as if I’d started the app fresh.
As soon as you bring up the task switcher, Mango takes a screen shot of the app for the thumbnail so that the app doesn’t actually have to run and consume CPU cycles to continuously render a UI. Interestingly, I found that I could actually tell that it was a screen shot — when you first tap a thumbnail to bring the app to the foreground, the view briefly looks like a highly-compressed JPEG before switching back to normal. Current third-party app behavior is a little annoying here, because what you see is not necessarily what you get — take the Doodle Jump example above — and there was usually a brief period after the thumbnail zoomed in that the screen would go black while the app kicked back into gear. Again, I’m hoping this’ll be cleared up for most apps by the time Mango launches, or shortly thereafter. Conspicuously missing from the switcher is landscape support; Microsoft is gunning for improved landscape support in Mango overall, so I’m hoping this makes the cut by launch. It’d be nice to be able to see more than one complete thumbnail on the screen at a time, and in portrait, you can’t.
Photos
When you share your photos on Facebook or Windows Live, Mango automatically runs face recognition and prompts you to tap the boxes to associate contacts with the faces it finds — and it happens basically instantaneously, even before the photo uploads. What I don’t understand, though, is why Microsoft’s limiting the functionality to photos shared on services. I understand that this is an extremely social platform — almost to the point where non-Facebook users shouldn’t even consider it — but given that all the heavy lifting is happening in the phone itself and you’ve got plenty of local storage, I don’t see why you couldn’t tag photos for your own reference and keep the associations inside the People hub without exporting for everyone to see.
Bing Vision and Local Scout
Bing has rapidly become a rallying point for Microsoft — a product platform that’s positioned as an answer to Google in many ways, though it’s generally regarded as having a long way to go to get there. With Local Scout and Bing Vision in particular, I get the impression that Microsoft’s insinuating “we’re doing this better than Google or anyone else.” It’s a bold claim — but then again, pretty much everything about Windows Phone has been “bold” in one way or another since day one.
But allow me to back up for a second. What all does Local Scout do? Basically, it takes a look at where you are then breaks out into four pivots — Eat+Drink, See+Do, Shop, and Highlights. Eat+Drink, as you’ve probably guessed, calls out the nearest bars and restaurants and displays addresses, distances, relative costs, and ratings. See+Do is a tile grid of local attractions and events — if Bing can find an image to go along with a particular item, you’ll see it in the background of the tile, and you can tap any tile for full details. Shop resembles the Eat+Drink list but for retail instead of dining, and Highlights seems to somehow intelligently select a few places from across all the categories that it thinks you should check out, though I’m not sure what black magicks Microsoft is using to make those selections. In any event, the data for all this jazz is coming from a variety of sources: I saw TripAdvisor, Citysearch, and Zvents in there, but I’d imagine there are a number of others. I saw a few recommendations on the See+Do results that didn’t make any sense; offices of businesses listed as “tourist attractions” and events that no one would want to attend, for instance, but they were generally quite good — and even a clueless tourist should be able to sort the wheat from the chaff with a glance.
Bing Vision is Microsoft’s answer to Google Goggles — but like Local Scout, the secret sauce is in its level of integration with the platform. This is something I didn’t have a chance to fully test, since the third-party apps to tie in here and let you, for example, buy the stuff you identify using Vision simply don’t exist yet. In the meantime, you can aim it at barcodes, QR codes, Microsoft Tags, books, CDs, DVDs, or plain text. Obviously, camera quality and lighting conditions are key to your success here, but I found that the app was pretty adept at picking barcodes off products in any situation. I was also rather shocked to find that it rapidly identified a book (my own Palm Pre for Dummies, of course) with little drama. As it finds objects it can decode, Bing search results appear as a text overlay on the screen that can be very hard to read — and for some reason, the book matches disappear very quickly once Vision no longer detects that the book is in the camera’s view. Once that happens, you need to go into History (at the bottom of the screen) to see what you’ve scanned.
Twitter integration and Skype: not ready for consumption
Many users won’t likely care — but for me and many of my colleagues, proper contact-level Twitter integration in Mango is a pretty sexy and important addition to the platform. Unfortunately, it’s not here yet. You can choose it as an account type in system settings, but the phone informs you that you need to be sent out to Twitter’s website to authorize device access to your account — and at the bottom of the screen, you’ve got a “Coming Soon!” placeholder button. I’m really looking forward to seeing that go live, because for me, it’s going to make the People hub and contact Live Tiles considerably more useful.
As for Skype, it’s not actually a part of Mango — it’s just an app — but we’re sure it’s got a lot more visibility inside Microsoft since the recent acquisition. Mango’s new multitasking capabilities mean that Skype should be a good deal more useful, too (a little bit like the transition from iOS 3 to 4). But alas, it’s not here for us to test just yet. Something tells me Skype’s going to figure prominently into the Windows Phone equation down the road; like Facebook and Twitter, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was simply an integrated service by the time we get to version 8.
Wrap-up
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