A Smartphone OS For Beginners

Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”

A Smartphone OS

For Beginners  .....

Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5, otherwise known as “Mango,” is sweet. It’s full of people-centric features that make it easier to stay in touch with friends and family, to communicate, and to share ideas. It’s easier to use than Android, and in many ways slicker than Apple’s iOS. But since it doesn’t support most forms of 4G or the latest hardware, it may not get the phones or promotion it deserves.

                                  Mango brings dozens, if not hundreds, of new features to Windows Phone. It has a much better browser, limited multitasking, Twitter and LinkedIn integration, a terrific interface for creating ad-hoc groups of friends, better ways for apps to give you useful information, the option for Wi-Fi hotspot mode, and much more.

       Windows Phone 7 has always been activity- centered rather than app-centered. Its hubs let you focus on ideas like “people,” “pictures,” or “music” rather than about which particular app or service you need at the moment.

    

                My favorite new Mango feature is the new Groups option in the People hub. With Facebook and Twitter added to your phone book, you’re probably going to have a lot of contacts. Groups help you make sense of them. I don’t use Facebook because I find it overwhelming, but Mango makes me want to use it again. I set up a Family group and saw only the updates and photo albums from my family; a Work group showed only updates and photo albums from colleagues. We move in multiple circles, and Mango lets your phone reflect that.

              The new IE9 browser brings Windows Phone up to par with the latest browsers on other platforms. It still doesn’t support Flash, but it handles HTML5 and has solid performance, though its benchmarks fell below those of the latest Android 2.3 and BlackBerry 7 phones on our tests.

                                          What’s not so ripe about Mango? Unfortunately, Microsoft’s hardware spec is behind the times, which will prevent Mango from getting much traction. The OS doesn’t support LTE or WiMAX, which means that neither Verizon nor Sprint will promote it with enthusiasm. It doesn’t support dualcore processors, the current state of the art, or the latest GPUs. And it only allows an 800-by-480 screen resolution. Still, Mango is a world-class operating system, and I think many people, especially smartphone newcomers, would prefer it to market leader Android and to the declining BlackBerry OS. Now Microsoft needs to focus on the other aspects of the phone experience—hardware, marketing, and sales—to make sure that this Mango doesn’t rot on the shelf