Announcements update Windows Phone 7 "Mango" and the release of development tools

Yesterday, May 24, Microsoft held a special press event dedicated to updating Windows Phone 7, codenamed “Mango”. During the event, which was broadcast online, several important announcements were made and new features were demonstrated, which will be available on the Windows Phone 7 platform in the fall of 2011.

Update Mango will be free for all and will offer users more than 500 new features and capabilities to work with phones. During the event, some innovations were demonstrated in the Windows Phone 7 mobile platform.
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You can watch the recording of the event online at the following link . Additional materials are available on the company's press center page . The official press release is available here . Overview of innovations and announcements can be found here . Developers will be interested to read the official announcement of the new development tools for Windows Phone 7 Mango.

You can download the new version of the development tools now !

Under the cat is an overview of the event and description of the main announcements

Communications

Threads, Groups



Threads are the ability to switch between using SMS, Facebook chat and Windows Live Messenger in the same conversation with your contact. If you want, you can reply to SMS from a friend by sending him a message on Facebook, and he can answer you via Live Messenger. In this case, the conversation will look like a regular correspondence, regardless of the protocol and communication service;

Groups is the ability to group contacts from various sources (Exchange, Hotmail, Facebook, Gmail, etc.) into groups that can later be viewed separately, including viewing aggregated news, shared photos, and so on. Groups can be attached to a separate Live Tile on the start screen and receive event updates in the form of a live tile for group members. There will be an opportunity for group communication among users of the group via Facebook and Windows Live Messenger chat rooms or email.

Deeper social integration



In addition to the existing social platforms built into the platform, the Mango update will support Twitter and LinkedIn with full integration into all key components of the system. In addition, support for the Facebook Check-in service will be added.

The new version of the platform will include support for automatic face recognition with appropriate tagging of images for further publication on the web.

In addition to the aggregation of news from social networks on your contacts, in Mango there will be an aggregation of photos shared by your friends in their social networks.

For contacts, the interaction history tab will appear, in which you can see all the history of communication with the contact: through voice mail, SMS, calls, IM, email and so on.

Mail, Linked Inbox, Calendars



Linked Inbox is the ability to link multiple email accounts in order to view mail from them in the form of a single list. In addition, support for conversations of letters and conversations will allow more convenient to work with the mail.

In addition to support for conversations, WP7 will receive support for secure emails, which are often used in corporate environments to protect against unwanted information distribution.

Calendars in WP7 will be even better, the user will be able to more conveniently register events from email messages in the calendars. Plus, it will be possible to display events from your Facebook account in a single calendar.

Hands-free messaging. The ability to receive and send messages and mail without touching the device, using only voice commands. The updated version of the platform will have a built-in speech synthesizer that will read the message to you, and the voice recognition service will allow you to respond to the message simply by dictating it and saying the command “Send”.

Smart approach to applications

Appconnect



The search engine in the Mango update will be able to offer the user the application installed on the phone as a result of the search. These applications are able to process a search query of a particular type. For example, a user is looking for information about a certain movie. In addition to the information found on the Internet, WP7 will offer the user to search this movie in an installed application (for example, IMDB). The user will need to select the application registered in the search and it will automatically start and carry out the necessary search. Thus, the line between phone services and third-party software is erased, the user does not feel the moment the application is launched, he performs the usual search actions.

Similarly, the face will be erased when working with images, music and video or books. Applications will be allowed to register themselves for different tasks, so that the user will not sense their launch, but will do the work he needs.

Improved Live Tiles. Start screen tiles will now be able to display information in real time. For example, a mapping application can display the current location on a tile. Aviation services will display flight status and so on.

Multitasking. The Mango update will add platform support for multitasking and fast transition between applications. A new class of applications on the platform will be able to work in the background, for example, programs for listening to online radio.

Internet and browser

Internet Explorer 9



In the platform update, IE will be upgraded to the desktop Internet Explorer 9. Now the mobile phone browser will be able to use GPU acceleration to quickly display graphics and animation on web pages. During the event, a comparison of the browsers of four popular platforms was made, which showed the benefits of IE9 on the WP7 platform.

Local Scout. Further development of the ideas of finding nearby public places: restaurants, shops and events.

Bing Improvements



The new Bing Vision feature will allow you to search for a description of items in the network and online stores, not only by scanning bar codes and bar codes, but also by shooting the cover of books, CDs and DVDs! During the event, an example was demonstrated with a book that was found on the network by simply shooting it with a camera.

Another feature of Bing Music Search allows you to find music on the network and its description through a microphone, as well as books through a video camera.

Quick cards

During the search for a product, a movie or a specific place, you will be offered special information blocks on the search object with support through AppConnect to continue searching in a third-party application.

Xbox, Office, SkyDrive

The update will be significantly reworked Xbox Live for greater convenience of working with a large number of games. Improved support for Xbox Live 3D avatars and working with the social elements of the gaming network will appear. With the help of new features, you can find your friends and compare their game achievements in Xbox Live with their own.

Mango will have full support for the new Microsoft Office 365 cloud service.

In addition, the full-featured work with Microsoft SkyDrive free cloud storage will be added, which offers users 25 gigabytes for free use.

New manufacturers of Windows Phone 7

Microsoft announced that the next wave of devices based on Windows Phone 7 with the Mango update will be released by a large number of vendors. In addition to Nokia, whose devices will be released immediately with the update Mango, their first devices based on WP7 will be released by Acer, Fujitsu and ZTE. Samsung, LG and HTC will also introduce new WP7 based devices with the Mango update.

For developers

Developers will be able to combine Silverlight applications with XNA graphics. This was demonstrated by the example of the British Airways application, in which you can see the 3D-scene of the aircraft and select the desired location for registration.



The developers have already created over 18,000 applications for Windows Phone 7 and with the advent of a huge number of innovations in Mango, this number will increase significantly. But developers do not need to wait for an update for the platform; today they can start exploring new features using the beta version of free development tools for Windows Phone 7 Mango.

Links to resources for developers:

• Video interview with Matt Bencke on Channel 9 ;
• What's new in Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 (MSDN);
• New code examples ;
• New information for game developers on the App Hub;
• Supporting documentation for the release of Windows Phone Developer Tools;
• Direct link to download updated development tools.

Developers can access a variety of video sessions from the MIX'11 conference dedicated to developing on Windows Phone 7 at this address .

Localization in Russian

With the release of Mango, Russian-speaking users of Windows Phone 7 will receive full platform localization into Russian. The Windows Phone Marketplace application store will also be localized.



More information on the Windows Phone 7 platform and the development of applications for it will be presented during the Russian conference DevCon, which will be held tomorrow, May 26. Watch live video broadcasts from the conference on the site http://msdevcon.ru/ .

PS: the first reviews of the localized version of Windows Phone 7 already appear in Runet