Windows Phone 7 Mango: New Partners, No New Phones

Microsoft is today giving more details of the Mango update which will be shipped free to Windows Phone 7 users in Autumn providing multi-tasking and other features.

The events round the world will also introduce new partners – Acer, Fujitsu and ZTE – but no new phones, and no news of the arrival of Windows Phone models from Microsoft’s biggest partner, Nokia, which is using Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system to replace Symbian in its smartphone range.

Mango – more than multitasking

The Mango update is more than multitasking, said Achim Berg, corporate vice president for mobile at Microsoft, in a briefing with eWEEK Europe. It will contain 500 updates which also include other major features.

Multi-tasking was the headline feature,when Mango was announced at Mobile World congress in Barcelona in February. It will catch the Microsoft operating system up with rivals Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone in an important and hotly disputed area.

“In Barcelona, we announced multitasking, and we have a smart way to do it,” said Berg. “Multitasking is dangerous, because if it is uncontrolled it sucks the battery, but if it is controlled it is not multitasking.” Microsoft has found a compromise in giving multiple applications an idle baseline of a few seconds per hour, he said.

The update will also allow threading conversations across different media, so a discussion which starts in Live chat can be switched across to Twitter, Facebook or email. This builds on Windows Phone’s approach of grouping functions together in hubs.

“Other smartphone operating systems are silos, with a grid of icons and a sea of apps,” said Berg. “It’s like if you wanted to go from the living room to the kitchen, you always had to go through the main entrance.” Despite downplaying apps, he was proud to announce there are now 17,000 apps in the Windows Phone store.

Grouping is a powerful business tool, he said allowing him to group people by context, and put “all the management team on a single tile”. Businesses will also like the close integration with Office365, allowing document handling that is “not comparable to any other experience on a mobile phone.”

Mango also has the IE9 browser also used in Windows 7, which will ensure it works fast, and can make the most of localisatino features which are coming up, he said.The OS will also support more languages, including Brazilian, Dutch, Finnish and Russian.

Uupdate coming for free

Mango will be shipped free to all users, from a date early in Fall, when their operators deem it to be ready. Users concerned about the issues with the February update to Windows phone, which froze some devices, should be reassured, as a later update went smoothly, said Berg: “I expec the same results as the last update, which went really smoothly.”

Users hoping for more on the Nokia relationship, or new phones, will be disappointed, as today’s announcement is all about the software. Berg confirmed that Nokia will be putting Windows Phone 7 Mango on its devices, and appeared to confirm that Windows Phone will only be on forthcoming Nokia phones not existing ones.