7 New Features Announced At The Windows Phone Mango Event

Just announced via Microsoft's PR channels, the Mango update is official now and has brought a host of new amazing features with it. Here's a quick look :

Fully integrated messaging alternating seamlessly between Windows Live messenger , SMS and Facebook Chat in the same conversation thread.

Local Scout gives you recommendations about nearby restaurants, places to shop and activities to do. Integrated into your search results.

Internet Explorer gets support for HTML5 and complete hardware acceleration, the ability to share web pages with your friends directly from the browser on social networks.

Windows Phone has also got the ability to make groups out of your contacts with the option for personalized tiles for the contacts. . See their latest status updates, conversations and you can also text, IM or Email the entire group in one go.

Finally a much-awaited feature by executives : a unified inbox. Combine all your mail accounts into one nifty inbox and access it through its tile.

Personal Contact card is like your personal one-stop on the phone to update your Facebook staus, check-in and update your IM status. And of course share it with others.

Bing Vision, Audio and Voice, which we reported earlier, offer new ways to search the net, integrated into the OS itself.

[Source]

By Akshay Bakshi

Messenger, Skydrive Integration and More Input Options Coming

After the recent revelation of new features for Windows phone, there are three more leaks from the a Chinese dev from cnblogs.com . Support for East Asian keyboard, dictionary and handwriting is shown. Office Hub will get skydrive integration and differentiation of file types will be done by color. Windowsphone8 also confirmed the instant messenger service on twitter, so chat addicts can rejoice about the messenger integration. A screenshot of the multitasking-like tab switching in mobile Internet Explorer has also been captured.

As Mango draws closer, more and more awesome stuff is getting out. If a 0.5 update is this good, we are already getting shivers about Windows Phone 8.

See the screens below :

[Source via WMPoweruser]

By Akshay Bakshi

Cool New Bing Features Coming to Windows Phone

Travis and Ryan Lowdermilk from Windows Phone Dev Podcast have announced some cool new features arriving on Windows Phone via their latest podcast. Voice recognition SMS , Turn-by-turn navigation, a Shazam-like service are some of the new features which should be coming to the platform very soon.

First up is Bing Audio, which is a service with Shazam like usage, you record a 10 second clip of audio and the app tries to identify the song and then shows you marketplace results to stream or buy the track. Integrated within the Bing search app, this will initially be launched in US, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Spain.

Next is Bing Vision, which is like Google Goggles for Windows Phone. Using the phone camera, you can scan Microsoft tags, QR codes, bar codes etc. Similar apps are available in the markeplace but adding integrating abilities into the OS itself is obviously a lot better.

Another couple of features are voice recognition SMS and turn-by-turn navigation, which are much needed additions WP7 and should make driving a lot safer and convenient for users. And of course, you will be able to listen to the WPdev podcast as well, because native podcast support is being added to the platform as well.

Though no official statement has been issued, these screenshots seem authentic and we are pretty sure these features will be making way to your devices quickly.

[Source via WMPoweruser]

By Akshay Bakshi