We Love...
Bing
Microsoft's little-search-engine-that-could has really grown up in Mango. Before, Bing was lacking and was typically only useful for us when doing a quick web search or looking up directions. Now we've started making a habit of using it for a lot more thanks to the new features included. Whether it's busting out our phone to figure out just what song that is with Music, having some spare time to look nearby with Local Scout, or going crazy and scanning random stuff with Vision, Bing has never been better.
People Hub / Me Tile
Windows Phone 7 when it was initially launched was nicknamed by the press as "the Facebook phone", and in Mango that has only become more true. The Me tile plays a significant part in Mango's social skills, which now includes quick access to status updates, Places check-in support, notifications, and chat status. Then if you jump into the People Hub, each contact linked to their Facebook or Live account has their Pictures included. Tie all of these features into the new Groups, and we think a lot of people will be 'Like'-ing Mango this Fall.
Internet Explorer 9
Windows Phone 7 when it was initially launched was nicknamed by the press as "the Facebook phone", and in Mango that has only become more true. The Me tile plays a significant part in Mango's social skills, which now includes quick access to status updates, Places check-in support, notifications, and chat status. Then if you jump into the People Hub, each contact linked to their Facebook or Live account has their Pictures included. Tie all of these features into the new Groups, and we think a lot of people will be 'Like'-ing Mango this Fall.
Internet Explorer 9
As fast and responsive as Internet Explorer Mobile was in the past, IE9 kicks things up a notch. Not only is the browser faster, it's also just plain better. Color banding is a thing of the past, weird formatted text is (mostly) gone, and we can finally use a near 90% of our screen to browse the web. Some have sorely missed the removed fullscreen option in landscape mode, but it really isn't a very big deal (especially because devices like the HTC Arrive/7 Pro needed compatibility). Plus HTML5 really rocks, we just hope more sites plan to recognize IE9 mobile (for example, YouTube's HTML5 mobile site doesn't show up in Mango--just the standard mobile site).
Marketplace
To say the Marketplace needed an overhaul would be an understatement, and Microsoft heard complaints loud and clear. The new Marketplace is a totally amped-up experience, making a ton of new layout changes and yet maintaining the same exact feel as before. Games and Apps have finally been properly separated, the native Podcast support is powerful enough to kill any 3rd-party apps available right now, and now even more content is shown meaning developers are more likely to get their app into a spotlight while users can find even more great apps. Win-win.
The Little Things
Windows Phone really excels when it comes to the little things--the tiny features that can plant a big wide smile on your face. One of our favorites is the new keyboard prediction enhancements, which are shockingly accurate. For example when we typed in 'The Dark Knight' and then typed a single R after it, the first predictive choice was 'Riddler'. That's awesome! Another tiny feature we love are the new interactions you can have with your Avatar in the Games Hub. Or the new ability to pin folders from an email account to the Start page, which is absurdly useful for us bloggers. There's tons more that we haven't mentioned here, but all of them combine to create a really memorable experience and shows us that Microsoft is pouring plenty of love into Mango before it reaches the production floor.
We Hate...
Multitasking
Before the hate mail starts pouring in, hear us out. For one, we obviously know that multitasking is still a Beta feature and we don't have any 3rd-party apps with the feature enabled. Secondly, our issue isn't with 3rd-party apps or apps at all--it's the limitations Microsoft has imposed on the feature that has our blood boiling. In its current Beta form, only 5 apps are allowed to stay open in the fast app switcher (aka the "Cards" view). Besides that, apps can also use APIs to do different tasks in the background even if they're not open in a Card. While in theory that sounds fine, in execution it was lacking. If you open app number 6, app number 1's Card disappears (it gets tombstoned) and there's no way of going back to where you were. In our opinion five is just too restrictive for what people want to do with apps.
For example, I'd love to be able to keep a Twitter app open at all times while I do other things so I can quickly go back. But for now that's impossible unless you do a lot of micromanagement to make sure the app isn't accidentally killed. There's also no way to simply kill an app, like a basic X button, so you're forced to go inside the app and use the Back button to reverse your way out. We can't help but feel that in an effort to make multitasking simpler, Microsoft seems to have made it more confusing and a lot less intuitive. Hopefully we'll get to see a significantly revamped form of multitasking, but for now we can't say we're satisfied.
Limited Landscape Support
Yes Mango still lacks proper landscape support for a lot of areas within the operating system. Just like in NoDo and the launch firmware, none of the Hubs orient to landscape and that has to be the biggest oversight we've seen so far in Mango. How are devices like the HTC Arrive/7 Pro supposed to even use these when the keyboard is still out? Microsoft has created Windows Phone with the goal of it begin accepted across a variety of form factors. While it undoubtedly looks great in portrait mode, the simple fact remains that Windows Phones are coming out with slide-out keyboards and yet the operating system still doesn't properly support them.
New Drop-Down Volume Controls
Speaking of landscape, one new change in Mango that also adversely affects the side view in Mango are the new drop-down volume controls. While in portrait they work quite well with large playback controls and a quick way to jump into the Zune music player, in landscape they dramatically affect usability especially in games. How? Take a look at the photo below of a game of Angry Birds. The drop-down volume controls take up more than a third of the entire screen and you're left waiting a few seconds before it gets out of your way. There's so much unused space to the right of the controls too that we're left wondering why they couldn't have just rearranged some elements. It may seem like something small, but constant access to volume controls means this will affect a lot of people so we highly recommend Microsoft look at this.
Wi-Fi
This may seem like a pretty odd complaint at first, but there's a reason why we're bringing it up. With Mango-compliant apps on the horizon that will feature lots of new background tasks, data usage is definitely going to spike considerably. Yet once again in Mango, if you have set the Wi-Fi on and lock the screen it automatically sleeps. As data plans become more expensive with lower allowances, lots of consumers don't realize just how much data apps can consume and so they may go for the cheaper option. Then if someone has 3G on in the background and thought their Wi-Fi would also stay on with the screen locked, they may receive an unpleasant surprise come billing day. We understand why Mango puts Wi-Fi to sleep (it uses up quite a bit of battery if it's always on) but we don't understand why there isn't an option to turn the feature on/off at will in the Settings. It's something insignificant compared to the scale of Mango's features, but adding it could avoid a lot of future headaches and will really benefit the consumer.
The Little Things
There's good little things like above, and then there's bad little things. For example, Internet Explorer 9 tabs can each take up a card and this is nice for quick switching between them. However like we said before, there's no way to get a Card back after its gone and if you open one too many IE9 tabs you may just close an app you didn't want to by accident, so adding an option would be nice there. Then there's the mysterious absence of Windows Phone's much loved 'Extras' feature that lets developers "plug" their apps into areas of the OS. For example, Thumba Photo Editor used to plug into the Pictures Hub under Extras but now the menu is completely absent and therefore requires more steps to get to the app. Finally there's the odd choice in Bing search results that removed the 'News' pivot and instead added those results in a condensed form beneath your web search results. This actually confused us at first as we thought these were search results, and we can only imagine that others will mistakenly do the same. We hope Microsoft moves 'News' back to where it originally was as a pivot instead.
In Conclusion...
There's a lot to love about what Microsoft has achieved in Windows Phone Mango. They've finally made Bing useful, the People Hub makes relying on a Facebook app less of a requirement, Internet Explorer 9 gives its competitors a run for their money, the Marketplace offers more content without screwing up what made it so great, and there are delightful minor tweaks that we can't get enough of. However, Mango is far from perfect and there are plenty of issues to resolve. Multitasking is very close to being called 'botched' in its actual user friendliness, the lack of proper landscape support is something that should have been fixed before launch, the volume controls in landscape really harm the experience even more, the Wi-Fi default settings could end up (literally) costing consumers in the long run, and there are minor things that really tick us off as to why they were broken or have yet to be fixed. Overall, Mango is still very much in Beta and while they've clearly gotten a lot more right than wrong, we hope Microsoft's hard working Windows Phone team still has enough energy to get through the final push and tweak all of the things we mentioned.
We Hate...
Multitasking
Before the hate mail starts pouring in, hear us out. For one, we obviously know that multitasking is still a Beta feature and we don't have any 3rd-party apps with the feature enabled. Secondly, our issue isn't with 3rd-party apps or apps at all--it's the limitations Microsoft has imposed on the feature that has our blood boiling. In its current Beta form, only 5 apps are allowed to stay open in the fast app switcher (aka the "Cards" view). Besides that, apps can also use APIs to do different tasks in the background even if they're not open in a Card. While in theory that sounds fine, in execution it was lacking. If you open app number 6, app number 1's Card disappears (it gets tombstoned) and there's no way of going back to where you were. In our opinion five is just too restrictive for what people want to do with apps.
For example, I'd love to be able to keep a Twitter app open at all times while I do other things so I can quickly go back. But for now that's impossible unless you do a lot of micromanagement to make sure the app isn't accidentally killed. There's also no way to simply kill an app, like a basic X button, so you're forced to go inside the app and use the Back button to reverse your way out. We can't help but feel that in an effort to make multitasking simpler, Microsoft seems to have made it more confusing and a lot less intuitive. Hopefully we'll get to see a significantly revamped form of multitasking, but for now we can't say we're satisfied.
Limited Landscape Support
Yes Mango still lacks proper landscape support for a lot of areas within the operating system. Just like in NoDo and the launch firmware, none of the Hubs orient to landscape and that has to be the biggest oversight we've seen so far in Mango. How are devices like the HTC Arrive/7 Pro supposed to even use these when the keyboard is still out? Microsoft has created Windows Phone with the goal of it begin accepted across a variety of form factors. While it undoubtedly looks great in portrait mode, the simple fact remains that Windows Phones are coming out with slide-out keyboards and yet the operating system still doesn't properly support them.
New Drop-Down Volume Controls
Speaking of landscape, one new change in Mango that also adversely affects the side view in Mango are the new drop-down volume controls. While in portrait they work quite well with large playback controls and a quick way to jump into the Zune music player, in landscape they dramatically affect usability especially in games. How? Take a look at the photo below of a game of Angry Birds. The drop-down volume controls take up more than a third of the entire screen and you're left waiting a few seconds before it gets out of your way. There's so much unused space to the right of the controls too that we're left wondering why they couldn't have just rearranged some elements. It may seem like something small, but constant access to volume controls means this will affect a lot of people so we highly recommend Microsoft look at this.
Wi-Fi
This may seem like a pretty odd complaint at first, but there's a reason why we're bringing it up. With Mango-compliant apps on the horizon that will feature lots of new background tasks, data usage is definitely going to spike considerably. Yet once again in Mango, if you have set the Wi-Fi on and lock the screen it automatically sleeps. As data plans become more expensive with lower allowances, lots of consumers don't realize just how much data apps can consume and so they may go for the cheaper option. Then if someone has 3G on in the background and thought their Wi-Fi would also stay on with the screen locked, they may receive an unpleasant surprise come billing day. We understand why Mango puts Wi-Fi to sleep (it uses up quite a bit of battery if it's always on) but we don't understand why there isn't an option to turn the feature on/off at will in the Settings. It's something insignificant compared to the scale of Mango's features, but adding it could avoid a lot of future headaches and will really benefit the consumer.
The Little Things
There's good little things like above, and then there's bad little things. For example, Internet Explorer 9 tabs can each take up a card and this is nice for quick switching between them. However like we said before, there's no way to get a Card back after its gone and if you open one too many IE9 tabs you may just close an app you didn't want to by accident, so adding an option would be nice there. Then there's the mysterious absence of Windows Phone's much loved 'Extras' feature that lets developers "plug" their apps into areas of the OS. For example, Thumba Photo Editor used to plug into the Pictures Hub under Extras but now the menu is completely absent and therefore requires more steps to get to the app. Finally there's the odd choice in Bing search results that removed the 'News' pivot and instead added those results in a condensed form beneath your web search results. This actually confused us at first as we thought these were search results, and we can only imagine that others will mistakenly do the same. We hope Microsoft moves 'News' back to where it originally was as a pivot instead.
In Conclusion...
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