Mango Preview: Tons of New Features Discovered in Mango SDK

XDA-Developers has appropriately torn into the new Mango Development SDK like a present on Christmas morning, and they've found quite a few juicy morsels we didn't know about yet. In Zune there's a couple of notable additions like Smart-DJ support, the ability to save playlists, and a new Related Artists pivot in the artist panorama. In Maps we've already seen turn-by-turn navigation leaked, but there's also the added ability to move around on the map while directions are open and the small yellow icon that displays your current location is now colored to match your theme. In Bing itself, we're seeing a good number of changes including Music Search will offer a direct link to the Marketplace after recognizing a song, a built-in app search feature which brings up links to apps in the Search results, and the new ability to unlock your phone via the hardware Search button! We also saw that the camera can now remember your settings (yes!), substantial predictive-text improvements in the native keyboard, Internet Explorer 9 performance boosts and more.

We're planning to go more in-depth with the emulator ourselves soon, but in the meantime just look at all of this stuff! Jump past the break for more images of IE9, Music Search, Zune, Maps, Background Tasks, and Bing App Search along with the full list of features discovered so far.

We'd just like to give a big shout out to XDA-Developers user Robin.B for all of the screenshots and the full feature list. Thanks!

Via: WMPoweruser
Source: XDA-Developers

Zune:

• There's a smart-dj feature
• You can create and save playlists
• There's a "related artists" and bio under the artist tab, great for discovering music
• Podcasts work well
• You can't "heart" songs (at least in the emulator)
• There's still no scrub controls

Bing & Maps

• Bing maps has voice-guided directions as expected
• You can show traffic on maps
• Still no landscape maps
• It's now possible to scroll the mini-map while the text directions are on-screen
• Bing music recognizes music like Shazam and clicking on the result will take you to zune marketplace
• You can now unlock the phone using the search button, apparently
• If you search for something on Bing that has an application equivalent; it will show you a link to the application within Bing.
• The "my location" icon now has the same colour as the OS theme

Keyboard

• Keyboard prediction has been improved a lot:
• It previously didn't correct misspellings of many short words like ar -> at, fir-> for and br-> be), now it does
• It also now corrects it if you press a letter instead of space between two words e.g. it will suggest "I'm about" if you type imnabout or imnaboit, and will suggest "How are you" if you type "hownarebyou"
• The keyboard also corrects common misspellings like Profesional -> Professional
• Keyboard tries to predict next word (as shown at 24th May event), e.g. If you type I, then "tr", it will suggest "tried", whereas in WP7 it will suggest nothing. This seems to work pretty well

IE

• Websites seem to render more accurately
• Websites can use GPS data for location
• Bing suggestions now appear when typing a search in IE as well
• Text still looks garbled when really zoomed out
• Tab animation has changed very subtly

General OS

• Same colour themes as last time
• It appears you can't "press and hold" the back button in the emulator, meaning possibly we can't do multitasking, even in an unlocked emulator.

Camera

• No changes in general layout. There seems to be a software camera button in the camera app
• The camera now has an auto-fix feature for pictures.
• It now seems to remember settings!