Posted on 05-08-11 08:39 pm
At MIX'11, a lot of information was revealed about the upcoming Windows Phone 7 changes in the Mango update. Today, Ryan and Travis Lowdermilk from the Windows Phone Dev Podcast have spilled the beans on a few upcoming features targeted at the end user. These new features include Bing Audio, Bing Vision, SMS dictation, on-device podcast support, and voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation.
Bing Audio
The first one, Bing Audio, is a built-in music search service, similar to Shazam. However, this will drastically cut down the amount of time needed to access the search function, as it is built directly into the Search button.
Bing Vision
The second, Bing Vision, is a camera-based search service that supports barcodes, Microsoft Tags, QR Codes, etc, as well as the covers of books, CD's, or even real products. This kind of functionality is a massive improvement to the current search client, and will make finding what you need a breeze, we think.
Turn-By-Turn Navigation
Another much-wanted feature is turn-by-turn navigation, and according to the podcast, this will be coming in Mango, along with voice guidance and, evidently, Map compass support.
SMS Dictation
The other big one is SMS dictation, which will allow users to talk to their device to dictate messages by pressing the Speak button on the compose menu.
All of these features alone are nice to have, but together, they make for strong competition. And while these features are present on many other phones in the form of apps, having these built directly in to the operating system is a huge improvement, and will certainly be a killer selling point. It certainly adds to Microsoft's integrated experience concept, and we're looking forward to the day we hold Mango in our hands.
[Via: Windows Phone Secrets; Source: wpdevpodcast]