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).
ZuneSpeaking 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!
