This is the new Windows Phone, Mango—with 500 new features, according to his Ballmerness. Crazy things, like multitasking! And other legitimately exciting stuff.
Call me crazy, but the coolest stuff in Windows Phone? It's Bing. The new Quick Card features turns a search for a movie or a mall into a neat compilation of relevant info like location, showtimes and reviews, or an indoor map. Looking up Madison Square Garden pulls up its schedule of upcoming events for the next couple of months. A new component, Local Scout, is like Yelp or Google Places but not shitty looking—it shows you stuff to "see + do" around you, like shopping and food, with recommended listings and reviews, pulled from Bing's database (which compiles Yelp, OpenTable and other sources).
There's also visual search, which partly what you'd expect-it scans book covers, QR codes, DVDs—and then it'll take you to a neat list of prices, reviews and the like. And with WP's new App Shortcuts, you're able to instantly jump to the book in Amazon's Kindle app, where you can buy it and start reading in seconds, for instance. BUT. It also translates text you see in real-life into other languages, on the fly. It's amazing. (Kind of like Word Lens, but with dozens of languages, and it's baked into the core of the OS and totally free.) Oh, and it has a Shazaam-like function to identify songs. Search for humans. That's what this is.
The second best feature? Groups and messaging. It's kind of like bookmarks for people, or like a buddy list (or lists in Facebook or Twitter). It'll let you filter all the social networking stuff for a particular group of people, so you can focus on the 4 or 10 or 25 people you actually care about. And it's got integrated group chat, through Facebook chat or Windows Live Messenger. (It's easy enough to plug new protocols into the architecture, Microsoft says, so expect more chat services in the future.) Also, with conversation threading across services, a la webOS—you can start a conversation in SMS and pick it up in Facebook chat then continue in email. The entire conversation history's listed in that person's profile on your phone. Twitter integration seems pretty excellent too: You'll get notifications when you're mentioned or receive DMs and people's Twitter status will get pushed to their Live Tiles on your homescreen, for instance.
You can (ugh, finally) bring all of your email accounts together in one view too—and there's full message threading, which looks pretty decent. (You can also collate two personal email accounts and leave work in its own app, for instance.) Same for Calendars, which now supports Facebook events. All good, all things it should be doing.
Multitasking looks solid, but also exactly what you'd expect: Apps "hydrate" and "rehydrate" for fast resuming, and when you want to switch quickly, it switches to a webOS-like card view (albeit, uglier with that massive background). Microsoft's Andy Lees explained it as a hybrid of every other phone multitasking model: The way apps go into the background and resume is like iOS, but the visual representation is like webOS's card view, while developers are allowed slightly more freedom to run "arbitrary bits of code" to do things in the background.
Other new app stuff: Developers can mix XNA and Silverlight, meaning run-of-the-mill apps like one for British Airways can now do crazy 3D stuff, like take you on a tour of the plane. App Shortcuts (like the Bing-to-instant-Kindleage ) will let you dive directly to a certain part of the app from a tile, like your boarding pass. Or, suppose you download a PDF but don't have a PDF reader on your phone-the Marketplace will take you straight to a PDF reader app.
A voice demo Microsoft showed off is pretty cool—receiving a text message while listening to music, the phone read out the message, and he was able to simply speak the reply, which the phone translated to text to be beamed away. You've got Office working better, with deeper SkyDrive cloud integration. The Xbox Live hub is redesigned, with more legit Live features—full Avatars and accessories, easy comparisons with your friends' Gamerscores.
And oh shit, things got real—to show much better Windows Phone is at the internet with Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft's got a BlackBerry Torch, Samsung Charge (Android) and iPhone 4 up there. In this speedtest, BlackBerry's got 4FPS, iPhone hasn't loaded, Charge is doing 10FPS, and WP's got 27FPS. If only FPS in a speedtest demo directly translated to awesome browsing experiences on phones. (They don't. It could be great, though!)
Microsoft says what they showed today is only a small slice of what's new in Mango. (Which I believe, since they didn't even demo the crazy real-life text translation app on the main stage, and there are updates all over the phone, from Music + Video to Xbox Live.) Everything Microsoft did show was slick and genuinely thoughtful. The search stuff is killer, and a lot of the social networking and location stuff looks pretty fantastic. At the same time, it's all, fundamentally, stuff Windows Phone simply should be doing. If this was the Windows Phone that had launched 7 months ago, we'd be having a much different conversation right now.
But. But. This won't be in anybody's hands until this "fall." (I'll venture Microsoft means "August.") That's months away. Depending on how radically evolved iOS5 and Android are by then, Microsoft could again be catching up to someone else's footsteps. Microsoft also needs an incredible phone, a phone built with hopes and dreams, a phone that'll set the expectations of what a phone should look and feel like for the next year. A phone that'll sell Windows Phone. Not just a handful of 4G phones from Samsung, LG and HTC that looks like every other phone these guys are making for every other platform. I really hope Nokia's making this miracle phone for them right now. [Microsoft]
