gdgt

So last week I installed the developer's beta version of Mango on my HD7 and last night I installed the leaked RTM and I thought it'd be nice to share some of my impressions, and take questions if there are any, of Mango.

Mango is definitely an improvement for the OS. It is much faster when going from app to app (the loading screens are much shorter). The multitasking UI is also very nice and makes switching between apps MUCH FASTER (hold down the back button to activate) but, as far as I could tell, nothing is really running in the background yet because none of the apps in the marketplace are enabled for multitasking. Also, within the settings menu, there is a task manager that shows you all the running apps. It'll show you apps that you can close manually and ones that you can't as well. The task managers are empty right now though because nothing is really running in the background. WP7 also added a battery saving feature, that you can opt-in to. Battery Saver will turn off some apps that are running in the background when the battery is low or you can manually turn it on until the next charge.

There are some new aesthetic features that they added that makes the UI even prettier. You can set the lock screen to show images of the artist your listening to on Zune and there are some new animations within the tiles.

Since I'm a very new Windows Phone 7 user I'm not sure if this is a new feature or not but you can now create groups within the People Tile and make a tile for that group as well. I thought that this is a new feature because there's a "family" pre-made group that I never saw in NoDo. I really like that feature since I can get a specific news feed from the people I care about.

Twitter integration is fully baked in now as well. This means that you can see tweets in your news stream and you can reply back or retweet. Unfortunately, you still you won't get notified when you get new notifications in the Me Tile. Checking in, via Facebook, is also fully baked in. Another thing to note as well is LinkedIn integration is has been added as well, but I don't have anything to say about it since I don't really use LinkedIn.

In Messaging, you can now group message using MMS. Since I use Google Voice, this feature is completely useless to me (MMS isn't supported by GV). Facebook chat is integrated as well and works as advertised. In NoDo, I was annoyed that there are no batch operations in Messaging. In Mango, text batch operations are still not there so that was very dissapointing.

Search has also been greatly improved by adding more features. There's a new scout feature where it'll show you nearby sights. It's really fast because WP7 continuously logs your location so there's almost no wait to get your location. There's also a music search feature in which it'll identify any music you have by listening to it. That worked very well and I really like how the result will show a link to the marketplace as well. The most useful feature, in my opinion, is the image scanning search. The image scanner can scan book covers, barcodes, QR codes, Microsoft Tags, CD, and DVDs. It can also scan text from a paper or a screen and translate that page. The best part is that it'll superimpose the translation right on top of the words of the document. You can also click on each word specifically to Bing.

The last thing I want to talk about is the new turn by turn navigation that is baked into Bing Maps.

It sucks.

I don't know if it's the phone or the OS itself, but Bing Maps took forever to find my exact location. Also, since it doesn't give you a visual cue if the GPS is being used or not, I had no idea if it was tracking me at all. The new voiceover is nice but pointless because, no matter what I did, it wouldn't tell me to turn here or there once I reached the intersection I was supposed to turn at. I would have no idea where to turn since the map portion of the directions is tiny and the directions don't follow you at all. The UI is also VERY unintuitive. Yes, WP7's UI is very beautiful but when it's so "simple" to the point that I don't know where to click WHILE DRIVING, it can become very dangerous. Bing Maps navigation, I believe, really needs a big overhaul.

Those are pretty much the features that really stuck out to me most. Like I said earlier, I'm a very new Windows Phone 7 user so I'm sure I didn't catch some of the little differences between NoDo and Mango.

If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask! I love answering questions but I might take a little bit of time since I'm in the middle of preparing to go back home. Also, if you want pictures of the UI or anything specific, just let me know and I'll post it up.

Thanks for reading!


P.S. If you want to install the RTM of Mango yourself, you can get it here: forum.xda­-developers.com­/showthread.php­?p­=16594850...