For anyone who is a Microsoft fan, the past few months have been anything but exciting on the mobile phone front. The last release of Windows for phones was a big bust that left everyone feeling flat. Finally that is all going to change. Microsoft has announced the release of their new mobile OS, WP7 Mango and talked up the wonderful newness of it all to partners at the Worldwide Partner Conference. This final release to manufactures (RTM) should allow builders to deliver real phones to some markets as early as August and September.
Microsoft will continue to work towards providing an update for current mobile W7 users but I can’t come up with anything more concrete than “sometime this fall”.
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Info from Terry Myerson on the Windows Phone Blog, advises of “hundreds of new features that create a smarter and easier approach to communications and apps..”. I believe this is corporate speak for, “operating systems are not a thing of the past”.
There is no doubt that Microsoft is finally getting on board and taking mobile business seriously. Touting 500 improvements for this release is more a matter of saying “here we come” than anything else. This release is what fans have been waiting for and it’s what didn’t happen their first time at the gate.
Obviously I’m not going to post a big boring list but I’ll mention some of the things I think will put MS back in the race, and maybe even ahead by a nose.
IE9
The move to IE9 Mobile is a big plus. Better hardware acceleration makes page rendering faster then the competition from Droid and IOS. Support for HTML 5 is there and this release has a polished look and feel that was missing the first go-round.
PROCESSING POWER
One of the more important power savers comes from the restriction of background processes. This is not limited to when battery power is low. This change means Mango will limit all background apps to a maximum of 10% of CPU power and just 5MB of RAM. This ends the slowness experienced in the original Windows mobile devices. No longer will background applications slow what you are doing now. This is a big improvement and it’s noticed immediately.
BATTERY POWER
One thing for sure, Mango is not going to be wasting power. Information on the battery saver option looks to be very practical. Once this option is enabled, all power hogs will be disabled as soon as your power starts running low. You won’t lose use of the applications, but they will change from automatic to manual. For example you will not get notifications of emails but you will be able to get emails manually.
I’m including a clip from PocketTown that I pulled off of UTube. It’s one of the better and least biased comparisons of Mango vs. Apple IOS. It gives you a fair comparison of how Mango stacks up against the current Apple offering.
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I’m very interested in hearing what you are using and how you feel about the performance of your chosen hardware and mobile software. I’m thinking very hard about trying a new Mango phone from Verizon when they are out. Thanks for your input
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