The web based version of the Windows Phone has now gone live at http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/marketplace . This is a web based version of the app store that allows anyone with or without Zune software installed to peruse the app store to see the now 20,000+ apps available to Windows Phone users.

In what will probably be a quick succession of key milestones before Windows Phone mango is pushed out to users Microsoft have updated the International Release Schedule.

As you can see below both Telstra and Optus updates are now said to be “Scheduling” which means we will probably see the update happening REALLY SOON (I hope).

In case you have not already heard here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here or here there is good news on the status of the Mango update for Windows Phone. Microsoft has just blogged that they can expect that Windows Phone device will have mango delivered to them “in the next week or two”. This come soon after Telstra announced they had finished testing the operating system at which stage it handed responsibility back to Microsoft to deploy.

Source Where’s Mango? An update on timing

In what is great news for Windows Phone user in Australia Telstra has just posted that they have approved Mango for release. The process is now over to Microsoft to deliver the update to the phones which in the past has taken about 5 working days.

Just a reminder to anyone that has Mango pre-release on you phone that you need to downgrade back to NODO to get the final version of Mango.

Source: http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/phones/smartphones.html#tab-spf (via WMPoweruser )

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:

A Microsoft Windows Phone event in Berlin has just shown off some more new features in “Mango”. Which should hopefully add a few more features to the The Great Windows Phone Mango Feature List.

Battery Saver Mode

Battery Saver Mode appears to be an option to conserve your battery when you start to run low on juice.

Your phone can turn off some service to help preserve your battery. For example you won’t automatically receive email, and apps won’t run in the background. You can still use the phone, send and receive text messages and get your email manually.”

Native Account Support for Twitter, LinkedIn and Office 365

Most interestingly there you can now add Twitter and LinkedIn as separate accounts in your phone as well as native support for an Office 365 account. Twitter integration was announced back in January however it was widely assumed that this would be done via hooking you twitter account up with you Windows Live Stream. It appears now that this is a separate account that you will set up on your phone to enable this integration. LinkedIn is presumably only going to support contact syncing which will be very handy for those that use the phone more as a work phone. However the native Office 365 support is something that AFAIK has not previously been shown off. Hopefully this account setup will also integrate with Lync client that was also announced for Windows Phone means users will not need to setup their credentials twice.

Check out the whole video below:

Source via NeoWin

Since I posted yesterday on a few of the “hidden” features in the Windows Phone Mango emulator I have now discovered a few more features.

NOTE: All of these features are in the current emulator that ships with the Windows Phone 7.1 (a.k.a. Mango) development tools emulator. I did not have to do any hacking to the emulator to reveal these features and can be found by simply navigating the UI.

Task switching UI can be activated by pressing and holding the “F1” button. It appears the UI is not finished as it does not show a preview image.

Photos taken with the camera now have an “auto-fix” option.

New normal pop-down volume bar with bigger numbers to represent the audio volume. There are now 30 different volume settings to chose from instead of 25.

Thread Options with the “Switch to” windows which would give you an option to change to Facebook or Messenger if it is setup.

Of course there are some Background Services Settings is also easily found under settings.

I can also confirm that the camera flash settings seem to be remembered when you re-launch the camera app.

With the release of Windows Phone “Mango” Developer tools Microsoft have now released the new limited functionality has been released to the public. Even though this emulator is greatly restricted there are still some new features that can be used if you just going diving into the UI following all the links to other actions…

Note: Everything you see here can be see by anyone who has the new Windows Phone “Mango” developer tools installed with the new “Mango” emulator.

MP3 Audio Playback now has the controls at the top and they have a repeat and shuffle to support the playlist feature announced at MIX’11.

Video Play Back now has a new button on the right that stretches the video to fit the screen.

Normal

Expanded

HTML 5 Audio Playback support is confirmed and will continue to work after you are back at the start screen. Then if you use the volume rocker you will see the new pop-down audio control with bigger buttons.

Search has the new Camera, Music and Audio search buttons… I found in my test that the music search was very good and the length of time taken to find the song depended on how loud the music is playing.

Voice Search also works well… Showing you results for Web, Local and Images… Also included was Windows Phone Apps that might match the query.

Windows Phone App now has new pivot view with Reviews, Screenshots and related panes…

Camera App has a soft camera button in the top left…

Bing Local search can find stores of certain type in an area.. You can also see reviews of that place under the “Buzz” pivot screen.

Turn by Turn directions is working… With Voice Guidance.

Map now shows traffic flow.

Update: Apparently the “Show Traffic” is a feature of the current version of Windows Phone. However this is not a feature of my HTC HD7 NoDo phone I bought in Australia so I assume this is a regional feature.

The “Nearby” button in the maps app shows you many interesting highlights of the area…

You can even filter on the types of places you want to look for…

Photos are now sorted into “Albums” instead of “ALL” and there is a camera button in the choose picture screen.

Contact Card now has History pivot to see what communication you have had with the persons.

Conversation View also shows that each type of message is tagged with the type (e.g. Text)

Here are a bunch of Windows Phone 7 “Mango” Screenshots showing off the new features of the new OS update that will be delivered between September and November this year.

New Bing Search page.

The full web with the IE9 Browser

Grouping of contacts.

Conversation view showing Facebook and SMS messages in one view.

Local Search

Contact Card

Unified inbox

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/imagegallery.aspx