Windows Phone 7's 'Mango' Update Looms: 10 Important Features

Microsoft is inching closer to launching its Windows Phone 7 “Mango” update. The upcoming operating system improvement will be coming to devices this fall and is now in the hands of vendors so they can preinstall it on their devices so they will be ready for the official launch.

Mango is releasing at an extremely important time for Microsoft. The software giant has been trying desperately over the last several months to cement its position in the mobile market, but so far, it has fallen short as its top competitors, iOS and Android, continue to appeal to both consumers and enterprise users.

Of course, much of that has been due to Microsoft's own issues. The company waited too long to release Windows Phone 7, and when it finally did, the operating system lacked a host of important features, such as full multitasking. But Microsoft is addressing that problem and others with Mango.

Read on to find out about some of the most important improvements Microsoft is bringing to Mango.

1. Apps and search play well together

One of the most important additions in Mango is the ability to search the Web via Bing and, based on what the user is looking for, call up apps related to a query. As Microsoft points out, if users are searching for movie times, for example, the new feature will provide users with a direct download point to add the Fandango app to their phones. If it's implemented well, the feature could have a profound impact on Microsoft's mobile application support.

2. Full multitasking

One of the biggest complaints of Windows Phone 7 users has been the platform's lack of full multitasking. With Mango, users will be able to switch between applications easily, as well as have multiple applications running at the same time. Considering competing operating systems already have that functionality, it's about time Microsoft follows suit.

3. Better Live Tiles

Microsoft has promised far more appealing functionality in its platform's Live Tiles. According to the company, its Live Tiles will provide more real-time data, as well as allow users to track individuals or groups of people from their devices. Live Tiles is far more useful in Mango, and most Windows Phone 7 users will be happy to see that.

4. People Hub is a nice addition

Microsoft is making it easier for people to keep in contact in Mango. A new addition called People Hub will help users find all the online places where they can contact a friend. One of the biggest issues on mobile devices now is finding where people are. People Hub is designed to cut down on those issues, and by the look of things, consumers will be happy to have it.

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Posted in: Microsoft

WP7 Mango dev tools get updated

Microsoft has just released a new version of the software development kit for the updated version of its Windows Phone software, Mango.

The move would seemingly come as an assurance that Microsoft is well underway to deliver its promise of having Mango open for business by the end of the fall season.

Earlier this week it was revealed that Mango would go live in Japan before any other country, and the first Mango-powered devices would be available there in September.

The new version of development tools it called Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Beta 2 Refresh. "The phone OS and the tools are two equal parts of the developer toolkit that correspond to one another. When we took this snapshot for the refresh, we took the latest RC drops of the tools and the corresponding OS version," wrote Microsoft in a company blog.

Mango, also known as Windows Phone 7.5, will be a cataclysmic update to Microsoft's still-nascent mobile platform that launched late last year. In its brief time on the market, WP7 has managed to make significant splashes but has also suffered from bungled management and updates that were delayed an almost comical amount of time.

Here are a few more features that will be coming to WP7.5:

- Streaming video or music content from the phone's Web browser will continue even if users open up another app or put the phone in sleep mode.

- Expanded Xbox Live connectivity - voice chatting with other Xbox Live users, attending or hosting Xbox Live parties, and possibly even playing online Xbox 360 games in real-time with console players.

- Extremely deep Facebook integration, tying the user's login credentials directly to the phone, eliminating the need to log in over and over.

In other words, Mango looks to be one heck of an update. The only thing to worry about is whether or not the update will happen as scheduled. Microsoft hasn't exactly boasted a stellar record with Windows Phone software updates up to this point.

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Posted in: Microsoft

Microsoft spells out Office for Mac bugs in Lion

No word when, or if, Microsoft will support new Lion features, like Auto Save and Versions

Computerworld - Microsoft last week confirmed that customers running Office for Mac will experience problems with the suite on Apple's new Lion operating system.

The most serious of the bugs crashes Communicator when Office for Mac 2011 users try to send an instant message or start an audio or video call.

Communicator is the corporate version of Microsoft's consumer-grade Messenger chat client -- it's available only to volume licensing customers -- and is also the software Mac users run to connect to Microsoft's enterprise communications server software, Lync 2010.

"We will fix this issue in an upcoming update to Communicator for Mac," said Pat Fox, senior director of product development with Microsoft's Mac group, in a company blog Friday.

Fox did not specify a timetable for the Communicator fix, but said later in the blog that users can expect updates "in the near future."

A second major bug may not affect most users either.

"On Lion, Outlook can't import mail from Apple Mail," Fox acknowledged. "We're reviewing this and don't yet have a plan to fix it."

According to a Microsoft support document, neither Outlook, which is included with Office for Mac 2011, or Entourage, the email client bundled with Office for Mac 2008, will reliably import messages from Mail.

This bug impacts users who install Office only after upgrading to Lion: Those who had earlier imported messages from Mail to Outlook or Entourage on, say, a Mac powered by Snow Leopard, won't be affected.

Outlook is not included with the lowest-priced Office for Mac edition, Home & Student.

Other Lion issues range from crashes in certain situations while running Excel or PowerPoint to a date format glitch in Word, said Microsoft in its support document.

Also, MSQuery, the tool that business users run to pull data into Excel from their corporate database, works only in English on Office for Mac 2011, and not at all in Office for Mac 2008.

And Office for Mac 2004 won't run on Lion at all.

That suite, released over a year-and-a-half before Apple switched to Intel, was written solely for PowerPC Macs. But with Lion, Apple has dropped support for Rosetta, the emulator that allowed programs compiled for the PowerPC to run on Intel processor-equipped Macs.

Although Office for Mac 2004 doesn't work on Lion, Microsoft will not retire the aged application suite until early next year: It has promised to support Office 2004 with security updates until January 10, 2012.

Like many third-party programs, Office for Mac 2011 and Office for Mac 2008 also lack support for many of the Lion-specific features that Apple introduced with Mac OS X 10.7, such as Auto Save and Versions.

Fox said nothing about when, or even if, Microsoft would add support for those features and others to Office for Mac.

Microsoft did, however, try to head off critics who may wonder why the company wasn't able to address Office's issues by the time Apple shipped Lion. In the support document, the company said it had been working with Apple "from the early days of Mac OS 10.7," and claimed "many issues were addressed leading up to the Lion release."

Office for Mac 2011 comes in two retail editions -- Home & Student and Home & Business -- priced at $149.99 and $279.99, respectively, and is available from Microsoft directly or through sellers like Amazon.com.

Microsoft does not sell Office through Apple's Mac App Store.

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Posted in: Apple,Microsoft

Is Microsoft Working on a New Social Search Project?

First Google, now Microsoft? Just a day after Google announced the success of its new social site Google+, which has reached 10 million users, Microsoft leaked what looks like a new social search project, which they've dubbed Tulalip -- The name could use work. The details were found on another site, Socl.com and were quickly replaced with the following message: "Thanks for stopping by. Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn't mean to, honest," reports Mashable.

While Microsoft gives a vague notion of the site, calling it an "internal design project," Gizmodo's Kat Hannaford questions this: "Internal design project, or new social-networking site?" It looks like it has social components, given the tagline (see the screengrab above), but it's unlikely a competitor to Facebook and Google+, as Hannaford admits. "Given the one image that was on Socl.com shows log-ins for both Facebook and Twitter, I'm hazarding a guess that it's not designed to take on either service."

Some techies have some guesses on what new Internet social tool you might be forced to join in the near future.

Source :http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/is-microsoft-working-on-a-new-social-search-project/242060/

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Posted in: Microsoft

Twitter and Microsoft Hammering Out Bing Integration

Having recently lost its contract with Google that gave the search giant a stream of tweets to throw alongside the company's search results, Twitter is treading shaky waters in its ongoing negotiations with Microsoft over a similar use arrangement.

According to All Things D's Liz Gannes, there are a few pain points that the two companies are currently chatting over. But, if successfully negotiated, Microsoft could ultimately land the keys to the real-time kingdom: long-term access to the real-time updates provided by both Facebook and Twitter, which would accompany the site's standard search results.

The two companies have six extra months to hammer out the details—Twitter signed real-time search contracts with both Google and Microsoft in fall of 2009, but Microsoft got a slightly longer timeframe than its big competition. Twitter is allegedly asking for an increased licensing fee for use of its real-time information: $30 million, or double the cost of the company's original contract with Microsoft.

While that sounds like a lot, Gannes reports that it's actually one of the "less contentious" parts of the negotiations. Twitter wants increased control over Bing's user interface, or how its information is presented within Microsoft's search, in addition to more links to Twitter itself within Bing. The two sides also have yet to come to terms with advertising: Specifically, how both companies will split revenue for advertising that appears in conjunction with Twitter information.

The elephant in the room, however, is just how much Microsoft needs real-time feeds. And more importantly, how the company's apparent push into the social space could affect ongoing negotiations. Consider Google: While the company lost access to the official Twitter firehose once contract negotiations imploded, Google went right around and deployed its own social network, Google Plus, which it will invariably use to build real-time social information into its search results in some extended, future capacity.

While Twitter might already have the established user base, it's possible that Microsoft sees a future where its own alleged social service, code-named Tulalip, becomes the company's real-time information repository.

And it's also possible that Microsoft could eschew the entire idea. As Gannes writes, real-time search has yet to become a driving factor on today's Web: In fact, the market for third-party real-time search services has been imploding as of late. To Microsoft, establishing complicated licensing arrangements with other companies just to gain access to a firehose of real-time chit chat about the latest Harry Potter movie might not be worth the effort in the long run.

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Posted in: Microsoft,Twitter