14 DAY TRIAL // On Tuesday, Redmond-based software giant Microsoft unveiled to the world some more info on the next flavor of its mobile operating system, codenamed Windows Phone Mango.
The next platform release should arrive on new and existing devices with a number of over 500 new features included into the mix, and some of them would involve the Bing and Zune services from Microsoft.
According to the developers' team over at Bing for Windows Phone, the new features that they included in the platform should result in a great experience for all users.
Some of the main features that Bing would pack in Mango include:
Bing vision and music search for identifying and learning more about products and music.
Local Scout provides hyper-local search results, powered by Bing, and recommendations for nearby restaurants, shopping and activities in an easy to use guide.
Cards give you handy summaries of relevant info (including related apps) for products, movies, events or places you search for with Bing. Windows Phone Mango would arrive during fall, with enhancements that span across communication, applications and Internet capabilities, including a mobile flavor of Internet Explorer 9, with support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration.
Zune would also be enhanced with a series of new features in Windows Phone, including support for podcasts, which would be made available for download through the Zune Marketplace.
There will also be the already rumored Smart DJ feature, accessible through pulling up the menu drawer at the bottom, through which users access playlists automatically created based on their preferences.
Windows Phone Mango would bring forth a series of changes in the Music + Video Hub, including a new interface, more accessible advanced music playback settings (repeat, shuffle, and favorite), along with a series of more options available through hitting the ellipsis (‘…’) at the bottom of the screen.
A series of changes were made to the lock screen as well, with the media controls visible at the top of the lock screen, so that one won't have to hit two buttons at the same time to pause the playing, or adjust the volume. When available, artist imagery would also be displayed here, it seems.
