Mango has arrived. The version 7.5 update to Microsoft 
's Windows Phone 7, which the company hopes will turbocharge its position in the smartphone market, will be pushed to phones over the next few weeks.
The Mango update, first shown in May, adds more than 500 new features to the platform, including ones that should add to the platform's appeal to businesses. The features include an improved Microsoft Office, a redo of the Bing search engine to include new functionality for hyper-local searching, a Music Hub with streaming services, and more.
Business-Friendly Features
Local Scout allows a user to find retailers or other locations of a given type, such as shoe stores or restaurants, within a given range of the user's present location. Music search on Bing, like the Shazam and SoundHound apps for Apple's iOS or Google's Android platforms, will now allow auto-identification of a song by holding the phone up to grab a music sample.
Similarly, there's a visual search that, like Google Goggles, does a comparable identification after taking a picture with the phone camera. Microsoft has also said Mango would allow parameters in compatible apps to be integrated into search results, so that, for instance, the search engine knows and uses your settings for the Fandango movie ticketing app, when you're looking for a movie.
Business users can now share Office documents via Office 365 in the cloud , allowing access to files from any location. Email messages can be grouped by conversation threads, and email folders can be attached to the start screen, so you immediately know where it is.
IT departments may appreciate several new security features in Mango, including the ability to apply no-copying and other restrictions to emails. There's also improved Outlook and Exchange support, such as stronger Outlook passwords, the ability to combine emails from other accounts into one mailbox, and easier ways to create groups of email recipients.
Custom Apps, Voice Creation
New Sharepoint support offers the ability to share presence information, create project teams as needed, and use video conferencing. IT managers will also now have the ability to send out custom apps directly to employees through the new Web Marketplace, without making them available to the general public.
The new Phone 7 is accompanying Windows 8 in its use of live tiles, large colored areas with live data . Twitter and LinkedIn feeds are now integrated in the People Hub, and there's broader support for Facebook events and other features.
A big hurdle for Mango to overcome is the number of apps written specifically for the platform, compared with those available for Apple's iOS and Google's Android. The iTunes Store has more than 425,000 iOS apps, and the Android Market more than 250,000, compared with about 30,000 for Windows Phone 7. The Phone 7 apps are growing steadily, rising from about 18,000 when Mango was shown in May.
0 komentar:
Post a Comment