“Our mission was to make today’s smartphones even smarter and easier to use,” says Andy Lees, Mobile Communication Business President at Microsoft, “and after 7 month we are here; with Mango.”

A media event was held yesterday; Tuesday May 24, 2011 by Microsoft in New York; for the official unveiling of Mango. According to Microsoft, Mango came with “500” new features. It includes much improved messaging experience, very powerful multitasking and social networking integration among others.

Main idea behind Mango update was organizing information around a person or a group of people, not in different application. Now the messaging combines various services. Using threads, now user can seamlessly switch between Windows Live Messenger, Facebook chat and SMS.


Thanks to text-to-speech and speech to text features; now messaging is actually HANDS-FREE. Mango introduces messaging service which reads incoming text to you and you can also dictate your reply.



The Microsoft apps are getting smarter. Real time information will be provided by live tiles, just pin a person or a group to the tile and all their major updates are on your start screen. Plus now with the much improved multitasking, user can switch between apps and leaving them running in background.

Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft’s latest release will be Mango’s browser. Along with Bing, a new feature is introduced called “Local Scout”. Its location based search will give recommendations on nearby gas station, shopping mall, restaurants etc. Twitter and LinkedIn clients are now available, and much improved Facebook client with check-in functionality and face tagging is also added.

For the developers, Windows Phone Developer tool Beta will be released and will be available for free download in next 24 hours on Microsoft’s website.
Although today primary focus was on software, Microsoft did mention that Windows Phone devices will be offered by Nokia, Acer, ZTE and Fujitsu, starting this fall, while for existing Windows Phone 7 customers, Mango will be free! Yumm!
For more updates, stay tuned!