Windows Phone 7 Mango: the highlights

There is a video on YouTube where Joe Belfiore (whose title is the slightly weird “corporate vice president, Windows Phone Program Management”) shows off the features of the new Windows Phone 7 update called Mango. This post summarizes the highlights.

• IE9 becomes the WP7 browser (with accelerated graphics, similar to [1]).
• Location-based search: get information on your surroundings such as eat+drink, see+do, shop, favorites, etc.
• Bing Vision: take a picture of a book, pick one of the suggestions (to help make Bing the correct guess) and do things such as buy the book, compare prices, etc.
• Smarter approach to apps:
  • Better and faster multi-tasking – hold the back button and flick through card views of running apps.
  • Pin notification feeds (on products, a delivery of yours, etc.) as tiles to your home screen.
• E-Mail:
  • Group messages by conversation (thread), collapse or expand conversations, remove messages from conversations
  • Multiple email accounts.
• Groups (of people): aggregated activity feeds (photos, status messages, etc.). That is, you follow a combined stream of the group, instead of group members individually.
• Threads: follow a communication thread with the same person across media (Windows Live Messenger, SMS, Facebook).

Related reading:

1. Internet Explorer 10 is “native” and good for webapp developers