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When we first checked out the Windows Phone Mobile Operating System, we were a bit hesitant about how it’d stand up against the competition, seeing how it lacked basic features like multitasking and a limited app catalog.
Since then, the competition operating systems have also evolved, with iOS5 bringing in a whole host of changes, and Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich OS version supposed to revamp the platform’s UI. But so has Windows Phone, with it’s new Mango update, bringing in features like Multitasking, custom ringtones, improvements to core apps and Wifi Hotspot functionality as well.
The UI still looks arguably new and fresh, and there’s a ton more under the hood changes to make the platform a lot more complete and functional than it was when we last played around with it.
Not too bad at all for an OS that’s almost a year old, eh? Read on for our review of the new Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update and the changes it brings since the original.
The Multitasking:
When I first tried out WP7, I was quite surprised to find that multitasking wasnt possible, even on an iOS-ish level. Thankfully v7.5 fixes that, and brings Multitasking in the same way as iOS does. That is, it’s not true multitasking like on Symbian or MeeGo. Apps are suspended in the background but tasks can be carried out by the OS. Once all apps are updated to use the new multitasking though, I dont think anyone would notice. I mean I havent heard anyone complain about it on iOS, except for the super power users. My only worry is the transition period for all developers to update their apps to support multitasking. On iOS developers took a couple months, so hopefully it shouldnt take too long here either.
Speaking of multitasking, here’s how it’s done. You can press and hold the back key to switch between apps. The task manager that pops up looks very similar to the latest version of Symbian, with thumbnails of apps ordered chronologically from left to right. You can scroll the list to select an app by tapping on the app. That will bring you to the app, at exactly the same state that you left it. The app switches seems to list only the last 6 apps you had running, so it’s more like a history of recently used apps, ala Android. Which isnt really my favorite implementation. As you open new apps, the old ones drop off the list of 6 (or so) apps. Which means once an app is no longer in the list, you have to re-launch it from the main menu, which starts it over from the beginning. D’oh.
So it’s not really a perfect solution, more like a combination of Android’s 6-8 recently used apps method and iOS’s freeze state of multitasking, but I cant help wishing I could keep those apps in the background in their frozen state until I explicitly chose to close them, like in iOS.
And if you arnt too big on multitasking, you can disable it all together from the settings menu, to save battery.
You’ll also find a list of all installed apps that support multitasking, here.
The Start Screen:
Now at the main home.. screen (Microsoft calls it the Start Screen) you have live tiles instead of widgets. They sort-of are widgets in a way, and have now been made quicker and show more info. The Pictures tile, for example, shows you an animated slideshow of your recently taken images. The Groups tile (which is a new feature as well) lists updates from your friends in the group. For example, I have a ‘Family’ group consisting of my family members, and it shows me their updates from Facebook, Twitter, etc.
There’s also a new theme colors – a Mango-ish Orange.
When you swipe to the right, you’ll see an Application list, which now has a virtual search button. Definitely makes it easier to find apps, if you have a lot installed.
Another new addition in Windows Phone Mango, is the ability to basically control it through voice, much like SIRI on the iPhone 4S.
You can press and hold the Windows key at the start screen to dictate out a text, have the phone read out a message reply, search for things, etc. It’s not quite on the same level as SIRI, but it’s getting here. Eventually. Some day. You can also manage your Windows Phone remotely from a browser over the internet, and install, delete apps, find and locate your phone, etc.
The People Hub:
One of the most talked about features in Windows Phone, is the People Hub. Heck it’s so good that Google totally ripped it off for Ice Cream Sandwich. There’s great Social network support, with Twitter and LinkedIn along with Facebook.
Like we mentioned earlier, you now have Groups, which is a great way to organize your contacts. You can ‘text everyone’ and ‘email everyone’, read combined status updates from the group from their various social networks, or view online photo albums. You can even pin it to the start screen for easier access to the group.
Apart from that, the People Hub is basically the same. You can jump to a contact by searching for them, or view the “What’s New” Tab which is basically an aggregate of status updates from all your contacts. There’s also the “Recent” tab which lists your most recently viewed contacts.
And you can search for a contact by typing his/her name.
There’s a very deep level of social network integration, so when you view a contact’s card, you see everything from his/her phone number, email address, Display photo and you can post to their Facebook Wall, or Tweet them, or pull in their last status update as well. That’s a crazy level of integration there.
There are also tabs in a contact card, like the “What’s New” tab that does the same function as the main view in the People Hub, but here only pulls in updates from that respective contact’s social networks. The Pictures tab has the contacts Facebook Albums pulled in.
There’s also a neat little History Tab that holds a history of your interactions with that contact, arranged by day.
Lastly, there’s also a ‘Me‘ card which is your profile. You can post status updates to Facebook or Twitter, set your chat status, check into locations, or change your Facebook or Windows Live Profile Picture. There’s also the “What’s New” and Notifications tab that shows you twitter mentions, etc.
Also worth mentioning, is that Windows Phone Mango lets you assign custom ringtones to contacts now. Heh.
The Messaging Hub:
The messaging hub has gotten a bit of a revamp on Mango. Threads are used for all non-email forms of messaging, from IM to Chat and SMS, all in a conversation view combining the three if its one contact (for better or worse). There’s no more distinction between how you’re communicating with your contact, since it combines SMS, Facebook Chat, Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk all into one view.
There’s two tabs under Messaging. One is ‘Threads’ and the other is ‘Online‘. The Latter tells you who is online, with the folks you’ve interacted with recently on top.
The Threads tab shows you all the threads created for every conversation you’ve had. It’s displayed in the usual speech balloon manner, with a tiny label on the left indicating whether it was from Facebook, Google Talk, a Text Message, etc. Helps keep things less cluttered. You can even choose which service to use to reply to a contact, along with basic features like copy-paste, forwarding a message or deleting it, etc.
Facebook Messenger has a separate App for iOS, Android and Blackberry which lets you send images and audio along with your messages. Unfortunately there’s no app for Windows Phone and the current implementation in the messaging hub does not allow you to send media in a Facebook chat/message.
The Email Client:
As you’d expect, the Email client also has a conversation view, which lists emails between you and the sender, arranged by subject and an indication of number of emails. If you tap on the conversation, it expands to show the emails, with a line from each one. To read an email you can tap on it, or skip to a new email, etc. Cant swipe between emails though.
There’s also finally a unified inbox, a feature that was requested by many users. You can link multiple inboxes so that you have one convenient place to check for new emails. There’s folders too, but if you’re a Gmail user you’ll be disappointed not to see labels supported.
The Multimedia:
The ol’ Pictures Hub has gotten a bit of an update as well, with a new ‘People’ tab that allows you to browser a contacts photo albums and even pulls in your own Facebook albums (Seriously I dont think there’s a better mobile OS to stalk people then windows phone, really).
You can share images and also video by MMS, Email or on Facebook/Twitter or just pick one for ‘quick sharing’ which only requires one tap. I’m not a big fan of how it downsizes Images to a lesser resolution when you email them though. Not cool!
Similar to Android, some apps like say a Photo editor app, can show options here, if the developer has enabled it.
Also if you’re uploading an image to Facebook, and there are untagged faces, it will remind you to tag them before uploading.
The photo hub uses the last picture you took as a background, but you can now change that to use another picture instead if you prefer, or to shuffle between different pictures.
Coming to the Camera, I’m VERY happy to report that the Camera app now remembers your settings. Hooray! You can always go back to the default settings if you want though. Apart from that there’s no major changes but hey that’s not too bad considering what it does now.
Finally the Music+Videos hub now lets you create playlists (you couldnt before) and you can use Smart DJ on the desktop Zune app to create playlists automatically, even right on the phone. You can subscribe to podcasts (audio/video) too which was only possible through Zune on desktop before.
The Office:
Microsoft has also been pitching the WP platform as having strong business capabilities. So its no surprise to see slight updates in that with Mango.
For one thing the Calendar app now lets you view sub-calendars for each account and you can give a different color to make entries easier to tell apart. There’s also support for multiple online calendars. You can also create a To-Do entry but that will only be synced to your Live account.
The Office Hub has also gotten something new: SkyDrive integration. Documents can be automatically synce between your phone and your computer, and Microsoft is offering 25GB of storage with each SkyDrive account, with individual files limited to 100 MB each.
If you’re looking for the old SharePoint tab, you’ll find it is now replaced by the Locations Tab, which lets you browse Office Documents stored on your phone, in SkyDrive, through Sharepoint or in Office 365, the latter being a paid service.
The Excel app has gotten one new feature, being the very often used Auto-Sum function, and you can tap and drag to convenient select multiple cells. Even One-Note has gotten a slight update and now has a To-Do feature.
The Web Browser:
Ah… Mobile Internet Explorer. The browser’s been updated massively to improve the UI and basically things look a lot better. The URL bar is always visible which can be a little annoying, but the status bar at the top of the screen compensates for that by auto-hiding as you scroll down. There’s a refresh button on the side, and you can tap the settings button to bring up more options.
You can also search right form the URL bar, which is a huge plus in my book, and there’s support for multiple tabs.
You’re limited to only six tabs though. I dont get what’s with Microsoft’s obsessions with limiting you to only six apps in multitasking, and six tabs here but hey that’s the limit.
There’s also no text reflow which can make zooming in and reading things hard. There’s also no Reader functionality like iOS5. However, performance has been massively improved, using hardware graphics acceleration to give you better, smoother animation and a reworked Javascript engine as well.
Sadly, when we compared it to Android, iOS 5 and MeeGo in an HTML 5 test, Internet explorer on Windows Phone scored the lowest of the four. Atleast it beat Symbian’s browser though.
The… Bing?
For better or worse, Bing is strongly integrated into Windows Phone.
It’s been slightly revamped, with features like ‘App Connect’ to make things easier for you when you search for things.
For example if you search on Bing for Recipes, it might show you a Recipe app form the Marketplace as the first result. It also does song recognition (win!) and barcode scanning now, all done natively.
The GPS, Maps and Navigation:
Bing Maps is built right into Windows Phone, and there’s free driving and walking navigation. Not quite the voice-guided navigation Nokia provides in their maps, but it does give you onscreen instructions.
It will read out the instructions as you follow them but only if you tap on the instruction (which is silly imho).
Also I have to say I’m not a big fan of the colors Bing uses in their maps.
There’s real time traffic information available (where supported) and points of interest. There’s even a separate app (or live tile on the start screen) called Local Scout that shows you nearby POIs. It has also has tabs to let you switch between eat+drink, see+do, shopping and highlights.
Apart from the above:
Apart from all the new things above, Windows Phone Mango has a couple other small improvements. For one thing, there’s Wifi-Hotspot functionality built-in, and you can also connect to hidden Wifi networks. The Games Hub has gotten a minor update, allowing you to edit your Xbox Live avatar, view achievements, and get messages from Xbox Live Contacts. Otherwise the Marketplace is basically the same, as are other aspects of the platform.
The Video Overview:
To give you a better idea, here’s an overview on all the key points we covered here:
The Conclusion:
Alright. So I wasnt wowed by Windows Phone when I first tried it out. I loved the Metro UI though, almost everyone loves the Metro UI. It’s different! But I wasnt too big a fan of WP originally.
Now though, Windows Phone Mango brings the Mobile OS up to speed on the competition. There’s very solid social networking integration. There’s multitasking, though I’m not a fan of the iOS-like frozen state and the Android-like limit to just the last 6 Open apps.
The Marketplace now has a lot more apps that when I last tried it out, including popular ones like WhatsApp, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and various others. Developers still take a while to get their apps on to Windows Phone though (You still dont see Angry Birds Seasons or Angry Birds Rio on the platform, for example). I’m also not quite a fan of how notifications are handled on Windows Phone.
But if you’re a fan of Microsoft software, you’ll love the Office integration onboard, along with the SkyDrive integration and Windows Live. Apart from that, it seems to handle everything pretty well. The OS is fast, very fast. There’s no Android-like lag even on very modest hardware. And everything pretty much works.
For first time users, it will deffo take some getting used to though. As much as Microsoft is pushing the OS by saying its simple, I still think folks new to the mobile OS will take atleast a couple days to get a hang of what it can do.
For users of Android and iOS, I dont see them switching right now. Android users will not like the closed/locked-to-zune syncing style of Windows Phone since that’s probably why they chose Android over iOS. Likewise iOS users probably wont like having to use Microsoft software, since everything in iOS is synced across so well. Well, unless it’s an iOS user that uses Windows.
Symbian users will love it. Sure it doesnt have USB-OTG like the latest Symbian devices, and there seems to be no HDMI-out support yet (or am I missing it?). Apparently there isnt even NFC support yet but I could not get confirmation on that. But everything works, and Symbian users are somewhat used to the lack-of-apps scenario so the transition will be easier. Heck I’d move from Symbian to Windows phone just because of the better browser alone.
With Nokia pushing the platform, I’m pretty sure Windows Phone is going places. It might take a while to get where iOS and Android are right now in terms of either number of apps, or features, but it will get there. So it a recommendable OS? Most definitely. But like all Mobile Operating systems these days, it has its pros and cons.
Clinton is currently based in New Delhi, India and is executive editor for UnleashThePhones. He is responsible for all editorial decisions, and covers all forms of Mobile and mobile-related accessories.
Cj is addicted to caffeine, social media, and technology. Always up for a good conversation, you can reach him through the contact form, his website, on Google Plus 
or on Facebook or Twitter: Follow @clintonjeff
That and the Zune for Windows software I'd imagine. Havent tried transferring documents tbh.
How can you possibly say Symbian users will love it when you say Android users won't because you're being locked into Zune syncing? There's NO WAY I'd use WP7 if I need to sync music and transcode videos through some shit desktop software! Are you completely insane? As a Symbian user, I drag and drop music and videos onto my phone from any computer and expect them to play right away. Not to mention being able to multitask to my heart's content without worrying if I open another application, will it kill what I have going on in the background. I'm not even get into the retarded font and blocky tiles interface. I can't even arrange my apps into folders? I'll need to scroll up and down through the entire list? This is an OS for simpletons and those impressed by flashly, meaningless gimmicks. I'll stick with Symbian for now, and make the jump to Android when NokiSoft kills it off. I'd even to to IOS first over this POS.
Hey CJ, Messaging Hub don't include Google talk please remove that from last line of first para under The Messaging Hub part.
Should not be talking about google ics because (IOS+WP7+SYMBIAN)=ANDROID ICS OS and Android= fucking copy cat
CJ, is the onlu way to transfer documents from phone to PC and vice versa via SkyDrive?
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