Mango: Maybe Microsoft's got it right this time

WINDOWS Phone 7.5 Mango is bound to turn heads for all the right reasons. The forerunner to the latest update of Microsoft's mobile operating system had the ingredients to offer worthy competition in the hotly-contested OS market, but it was beset with problems and far too many shortcomings.

But the latest software update, which has been weaving throughout the world via over-the-air updates since the past week, adds about 500 new features to the Windows Phone OS but still looks and feels no different from 7.0.

Nonetheless, it could be the most aesthetically pleasing mobile OS in the market today, and makes the iPhones home screen look immensely tired and very 2008.

The use of live tiles, while not exactly new (it was available on Windows Phone 7), promises less time inside apps to obtain basic information such as unread message counts or your friends social media status updates.

Many will find the notion of displaying multiple tiles from a single application on the home screen appealing, for example, a tile for each of your closest friends status updates or one for each item that you are bidding on eBay.

Threaded messaging, although nothing new, was unfortunately missing prior to the latest update and is a warm welcome to the OS especially the fact that a conversation that is started via SMS can now be continued on Windows Live Messenger (if anybody still uses this) or Facebook chat. All these conversations appear in a single thread.

Multi-tasking is done in a way that is similar to iOS, a feature also known as fast-app switching. Rather than eating up processing power and battery life by running fully in the background, apps that support this feature are frozen in the exact place you left it, and once returned, will in all probability continue where it left off.

This was also missing in pre-Windows Mobile 7.5, and it seems that Microsoft has been duly taking note of users feedback and implementing the necessary changes. However, it is worth noting that the suspension of apps in the background isn't done on an app-by-app basis, but rather on a screen-by-screen basis. You could have three message threads as the last three apps you've used, and all three will show up in the multi-tasking screen.

The number of frozen screens are also limited to five - anything beyond that will not be suspended and will simply require restarting them once exited.

Windows Phone 7 lacked success for a number of reasons: missing critical functions and features that other platforms were already flaunting, and also down to the fact that not many manufacturers at the time were focusing efforts on building excellent hardware for an OS that was deemed painful to use. Players like HTC were definitely not putting any effort into differentiating their Microsoft-based phones from the Android ones, especially in terms of design. For most consumers at the time, picking the Android version over the one running Windows seemed like a no-brainer. But that may change with Mango.

With only 50,000 apps in the Windows Phone marketplace compared to Apples 500,000 apps (and counting), Microsoft faces the steep challenge of making enough quality content to lure existing users of other platforms. They say apps are for kids, but its one of the major reasons why the iPhone still manages to attract millions of buyers despite Apple offering slight, incremental upgrades to its hardware (in comparison to its competitors).

With Nokia set on unveiling at least one of its first Mango-powered phone very soon, the future of Microsoft's mobile OS is shining much brighter. What will come out of the alliance between what is still the world's most well-known software behemoth and the biggest phone maker by volume will be an interesting development to watch.