Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) - Official feature set revealed.

Today, Microsoft officially unveiled its next release of Windows Phone. Although a lot of the features that were shown were expected, it was a pleasant surprise to sdee that the version was 7.1 and not 7.5, as a lot of developers thought it would be.

During today's demo, we saw the following improvements and additions in action:

• Updated live tiles (now easily accessible by third party developers)
• Threads (people can use Facebook Chat, Live Messenger and texting in the context of one conversation page)
• Internet Explorer 9 with maximum support for HTML5
• Groups (similar to Facebook Groups, where you can arrange your contacts in specific sequences for easier status tracking and communication)
• Third-party multitasking

Here are some resources to check on the new version of the OS:

Microsoft officially unveils Mango; Hundreds of improvements on the way

A First Look at the Next Release of Windows Phone

"Mango" Videos

"Mango" Images

Mango will be officially pushed as a system updated during the fall season of 2011. An exact date is currently unknown.

Developers, who are wondering where the tools are - a beta version of the SDK will be released in the next hours, so stay tuned!

Among other things, it seems like Windows Phone 7 marketing team decided to replace the logo, which is now a square containing the Windows flag and not a circle (or a pseudo-sphere):