Windows Phone Mango Emulator Hands-On: Marketplace, Zune, Voice to Text, and More

You read Part 1 of our hands-on with the Windows Phone Mango emulator yesterday where we talked about Bing's new moves, Local Scout's unique take on location, and turn-by-turn navigation's ease of use. Are you ready for more? Then join us after the break for more hands-on details about new changes in the Marketplace, added Zune features, the industry-setting voice-to-text feature, and more!

Marketplace

Since the launch of Windows Phone 7, the Marketplace has been an issue for both developers and users. The Search functionality accessed the entire Marketplace catalog and so results would come up for music when you may have been really searching for an app. NoDo took steps to improve this by adding some context-sensitive searching that didn't require any major code to be rewritten, but the context-sensitive search was still not very intuitive. Luckily Microsoft has taken some needed (and obvious) measures to change that with Mango and now Marketplace search is completely filtered by pivots for 'Apps+Games', 'Music' and 'Podcasts' (we'll come back to that last one). It works just as you imagined and is a big improvement over the current mess in the Marketplace.

Another area of improvement are the actual Marketplace results, which will now show you much more information than before. Mango has managed to squeeze in the app title, developer, price, and rating into that list of search results and we also think this was a long overdue but well-executed feature. Speaking of Marketplace search, when you start to type in the search field it will provide suggestions to what you're looking for just like Bing search does.

Finally, apps and games listed in the Marketplace now feature vastly expanded information pages once you tap on a list item. The new app information pages are broken down into four pivots: Details, Reviews, Screenshots and Related. We were never exactly fond of Microsoft's single page approach to apps in the Marketplace so seeing each important element sectioned off and given special attention was something we really enjoyed seeing. For music though, nothing has really changed: when you tap on a song or album result you get the same list of songs and album art along with pricing info and a review (if available).

Zune

Speaking of music, we managed to find our way into the Zune player (not the hub). Sadly however, it wasn't letting us login through our Live account so we weren't allowed to stream any music from the Marketplace and therefore couldn't see the new redesigned Zune playback controls for ourselves. But we still were able to sneak into those stylish Artist pages and we noticed quite a few changes. The big new addition is the fact that Mango includes a new section sandwiched in between the artists' biography and albums: Related. This shows you a list of double-wide tiles of other artists that are similar in style or genre. We always loved Zune's recommendation engine in the desktop software and it has been reproduced and pleasantly simplified here. Another nice addition is that Mango will now slightly tone down the opacity of a background artist picture, making it darker. This should be helpful to anyone who had trouble navigating the Artist pages thanks to a bright default background that made the white Metro text nearly impossible to read.

Podcasts

Music is all well and good, but everybody knows that technology nerds like us love podcasts right? Right. Which is exactly why Microsoft has answered our cries for an on-device podcast management solution similar to the stellar implementation in the Zune HD with Mango's new podcast features. Like we mentioned before, Podcasts now have their own dedicated section in Marketplace search results and tapping on a podcast will bring up a panorama of two panes: 'Episodes' and 'Overview'. Obviously, overview is a quick synopsis of what the series is and episodes is the list of podcasts.

You also have the option to subscribe to the podcast from the same screen, thanks to the options in the appbar below. You can also customize the series settings on-device now, which is great if you don't want to download too many episodes at once from your device. Of course if you're afraid of that kind of commitment you always have the option do download an individual episode and stop there.

Voice-To-Text

Music, apps, and podcasts are great strengths of Mango but let's change gears and talk about a feature more practical in people's day-to-day lives: voice-to-text. This is another area where Microsoft has set its sights on evening the playing field with Google's Android feature set and for the most part they seem to have succeeded -- we'll get to where it still needs work later.

First let's talk about how it works: say you're driving your car or you're working out on a treadmill and listening to some music on your Windows Phone. Suddenly you get a new text message and if you were on Android you'd have to open the message by hand and read it, but obviously you shouldn't look away from the road and it's a little tricky to focus on your phone while running on a simulated incline. Well Microsoft has thought of these scenarios and their voice-to-text feature is completely idiot-proof. When the phone receives a new message, a voice will ask you if you'd like it to be read and if you say yes it will actually read the entire message to you. Then you can choose to ignore or respond, and if you do respond the voice will ask you to speak your message into the microphone when the tone goes off. You say your message, the voice will read it back to you, you make sure it's what you want and then you're good to go.

We couldn't simulate that whole scenario in the emulator because we obviously couldn't receive texts, but we did get our hands on the actual process of converting voice-to-text for a text message. And it works! Pretty well too, as we typically didn't even need to retry our messages. Oh, and in case you thought we didn't check it: if you swear, the phone will recognize it and display it as those hysterical broken symbols (example: $^%*).

Voice-to-text isn't just limited to texts either, you can also use it in Bing searches (you can already in NoDo) and other areas...but not everywhere. Which is exactly our main issue with voice-to-text in this beta build. Android's voice-to-text is a button built into the software keyboard, meaning the feature is available across the entire operating system; it isn't for Mango. Voice-to-text is a great feature and Microsoft has executed it well, but we really hope they plan to expand it to more areas (preferably every area) in the OS.

Other Features

• App searching is now included in the Mango app list so you can quickly and easily search for apps on the phone and leap directly into a Marketplace search.
• We already know a lot about Internet Explorer 9 but we've included some screenshots of the new interface anyway and exactly what options are now available in the appbar. One small change we noticed was that Favorites and History are now separate items in the appbar when before they were part of the same 'favorites menu'. Also, IE9's address bar doubles as a Bing search bar just like before, but now you get search suggestions as you type.
• The master volume controls have changed in Mango and while not drastically different, we definitely dig the more Metro look.
• Despite working, multitasking was extremely limited in this build...which was probably due to the fact that Microsoft said the feature wasn't even enabled in the emulator.
• We spotted the new Background Tasks options in the settings menu but sadly we couldn't manage any apps that didn't have multitasking right?
• The Camera app has seen a few tweaks too. First of all there's now a new software shutter button, so Microsoft has given two options for amateur photographers: software shutter or hardware shutter button. Another addition is a new 'auto-fix' feature which can be applied to saved pictures but we couldn't test it out. Finally, here's the big one: the camera can now remember your settings! At least we think it can--so far the only camera setting we have available is the camera flash but it did save the setting after we changed it, backed out of the app, and reopened it.

Well we're exhausted. We hope this has been a pretty worthwhile Memorial Day present for all of you curious Windows Phone fanatics. Now remember, anything we've talked about here and in Part 1 of our hands-on can and most likely will change over the coming months. Some changes will be small tweak, others could be gigantic redesigns but for the most part this should give all of you an idea for what to expect when Mango launches this Fall. So feel free to get a little excited by what you've seen here. Just a little.

If you haven't read Part 1 of our hands-on with the Windows Phone Mango Emulator, you're missing out! We talked about tons of new Bing features, our take on Local Scout, and the drool-worthy navigation. So what are you waiting for? Read it here!

Windows Phone Mango Emulator Hands-On: Bing, Local Scout, and Navigation

Last night we got a little bored and had a craving for Mangoes, so we decided to snatch the new Mango Developer SDK and poke around to see what's new in the emulator. Sadly, a lot of features that we'd like to test out more thoroughly require apps to be coded for Mango and other things to access that were blocked off like the People Hub. Luckily we're more clever than we thought, and by carefully maneuvering around Windows Phone we found a bunch of changes.

We were originally planning to do everything in one massive post, but we think it would have been a little too massive. So for today you're getting Part 1 of our hands-on time with the Windows Phone Mango Emulator. Surprisingly, Bing is probably the one area of Mango that is receiving the most new end-user features. But then again, Windows Phone has been notoriously lacking in features compared to other platforms' Bing apps so it was about time Microsoft did something about it. Join us after the break for the new changes we spotted and why you may just fall in love with Bing again.

Bing
Let's start with basic searching, which has received some small but cool additions. There's a new feature called Quick Cards which is basically a general chunk of info for things like movies, restaurants, and more. We tested out the feature by looking up The Hangover: Part II and it worked quite well as we could see basic info and showtimes for theaters. From there jumped into a Quick Card after we picked one of the local theaters listed. Locations seem to show more info than movies featuring options like address, neighborhood (we'll come back to that later), "Buzz" (Bing user reviews), and in the case of a movie theater more showtimes for their movies. (You can see screenshots of those at the bottom of this section.) Quick Cards looks pretty promising to replace some smaller day-to-day searches that were once limited to only using apps. Of course we know that Quick Cards will include an 'Extras' pivot that will allow apps to plug into the other options, but we didn't have any apps to load into the emulator in order to test that.

Of course, two of the most hotly-anticipated Bing features also made the cut into the emulator, but sadly Bing Vision Search was useless considering there was no way to setup a camera. But we have to say, Bing Music Search rocks (pun intended). We were able to use it by hooking up a microphone and placing it next to our speakers as we played some Wiz Khalifa. However it was hard to tell if it was working--there's no indication as to how long you need to record a song nor is there any tone/sound that goes off when it's done. But after roughly 30 seconds, Music Search did correctly recognize the song which is impressive that it recorded the snippet, uploaded it, matched it, and sent the info back down in such a short timeframe. We figure your mileage will vary depending on the strength of a data connection, but it was still pretty slick. After the results pop up in place of the previous 'Listening' screen, you can tap on it which will launch you into a Marketplace search. We were wondering why it didn't directly send us to the exact album/song page but it's possible Microsoft is using a database for recognizing music that has more songs that the Marketplace itself provides so that's probably why.

A minor but very important feature we'd like to mention is that Bing finally has Image Search! We were surprised to see that Windows Phone didn't launch with support for the pretty basic feature, but now we can't rest easy knowing it's there. Another small but delightful feature is the ability to search Bing from anywhere in the OS. For example, if you highlight a certain phrase from an article on a webpage and then press the hardware Search button you'll automatically leap into a Bing search from that phrase. We also noticed the same behavior when you press the hardware Search button while searching in the Marketplace (no text selection required here). All of that is nice for our web searching needs, but what if you're on the go and you want to know where to eat, shop, or visit? That's exactly what we'll be talking about next with...

Local Scout
This was one of the few genuine surprises Microsoft unveiled at their preview event and playing with it in person is even more exciting to think of the possibilities. We were confused as to exactly how to get to Local Scout at first, but it's actually a part of Bing. For example when you go to the main page of Bing and it recognizes your location as near one of the supported 'neighborhoods', the small black bar above the search field will change from 'Explore Map' to 'Explore [Neighborhood Name]'. You can also find the neighborhood in a location's Quick Card when searching using Bing or Bing Maps. Tapping on that launches the neighborhood's Local Scout which in our opinion is substantial enough to be considered a new Hub. Local Scout is broken down into pivots called 'Eat+Drink', 'See+Do', 'Shop', 'Favorites' and 'Highlights'. Above these pivots is a mini-Map which will actively show you the location of a place you tap on.

Eat+Drink shows you a list of restaurants along with quick info about ratings, distance, and price level. The Shop pivot shows you a similar list of locations, only this time specific to actual shops, and will display info like category (example: Pet Food), location, and distance from you. See+Do is a little more sophisticated as it specializes in featuring public venues like the Microsoft Museum in Overlake, WA, but takes things a step further by also displaying events that are going on in the area. The Quick Card for such events includes basic info like when, where, and description but what's really impressive is that it will link to Ticketing options (if needed) which kind of blew our minds when we saw it. Moving on, there's also a dedicated section for your Favorites in a neighborhood and the last pivot, Highlights, will recommend new places to check out.

There's also a few more things of note we'd like to mention. First is that you can pin any locations to the Start page now which should come in handy in case you need to remember somewhere to go while you're in the area. We couldn't see where our Contacts would integrate into Local Scout like they showed in the presentation, so we're just going to have to sit tight for that one. Besides  our time with Local Scout was enough to show us the feature has a ton of promise--if it's widely available. So let's say you find a place in Local Scout but you need to know how to get there. Well, that's where the next feature we're going to talk about comes in.

Turn-By-Turn Navigation
Yes it really exists and yes, it does indeed rock. The way it works is similar to how directions work right now in Windows Phone. You start off by looking up a location by using Bing Maps' 'Directions' button in the app-bar. Once it finds your destination, an overlay similar to NoDo with directions and a small map preview appears. However a few things in this screen have changed; the text for the directions is much larger now (probably to work better with car docks) and you now have the ability to interact with that small map preview, so you can still see your directions while looking at your route. However the biggest change is one that's required for any good navigation service: voice guidance! As you follow directions, the voice guidance will actively tell you directions and how to reach your destination, which is pretty useful.

That's pretty much it for turn-by-turn navigation. So far we only have one small complaint: there's no dedicated app in order to start navigation. This is a place where it took Android a little longer to get right, but Navigation is offered in a separate app in that OS and also offers a car-friendly app with big icons and simpler controls. We can't help but think Microsoft should be imitating Google in this area, but as of right now we don't see that available. Then again it could be available and maybe we just don't have access to it so it's likely we're complaining for no reason.

Well that's it for Part 1 of our hands-on with the Windows Phone emulator and as you can tell, there's already a lot that we've talked about. If you're ready for more, check out Part 2 now!