Update: I have updated this table to include the new features with iOS5.

Update #2: Now that Mango and iOS5 is out i have update the table again.

One of the major differentiators that Microsoft pushes when talking about Windows Phone is that the overall  experience with there phone is less about jumping in and out of apps and more of just glance and go device. Therefore as part of the Mango update that is coming Microsoft has continued to add a lot more functionality to further enhance the glance and go experience. A good example of this is the ability to take quickly photos/videos with the camera button while under lock and the new search under lock feature that is coming in the Mango update. This is compared to the iPhone (iOS) platform that pushes “apps for everything” mantra to say that if the phone can’t do it then just get a free (or paid) and app that can add the functionality and just have the user jump in and out of apps to do what they need to do…

To show the difference in the philosophy of both Windows Phone Mango and iOS devices I have made a list of general features comparing the built in functionally of each OS as compared with the additional apps to get the same functionality. As you can see the gap that needs to be made up with additional apps on the Windows Platform is far less than on iOS devices.

What Microsoft seems to be doing is providing a great out of the box experience for their users rather than just push them to a massive market place full of hundreds of thousands of apps when they want to do something more on the phone. This would certainly appeal to feature phone users that probably don’t want or even know how to download an app for their phone. It also appears that having more functionality out of the box is a pre-requisite for Nokia being able to convert some their feature phone users to a smartphone platform.  In doing this Microsoft is targeting the majority of mobile phone users users that do not already own smartphone by offering them a device with many features out of the box rather than go after the users that already have a smartphone device. Certainly if Microsoft are going to have any chance of gaining significant market share this will be the tactic they need to take…

Feature Source The Great Windows Phone Mango Feature List

In a recent Channel 9 video with Brandon Watson and Steve Cosman they show cased the new Bing Audio features of Windows Phone. This feature is a lot like Shazzam built into Windows Phone however it has the ability to return the track in only a few seconds rather than normally 15 seconds.

Update: There is now a blog post the Bing Audio feature at the Windows Phone Blog Q&A: The story behind Music search

Note: On the video Steve mentions that Bing Audio will also return the Album Art however this feature is not in the current Windows Phone Developer Emulator.

What was interesting about this video is that this feature actually started out as Microsoft Research project.

“was started as a research group out of Bing… it eventually moved into a product group… and windows phone ended up being the right fit … the cool part of the whole process was seeing it go from a true research group… of not engineers but scientists all the way into a product group in a fairly short amount time".

Then Brand mention that the gyroscope API was also a research group feature and he went on to say “There is a lot of research projects that that found home in windows phone”.

What’s great to finally see is some of the fruits of labour coming out of the Microsoft Research Group actually show up in devices.

Check out the whole video below: