Mango 7.

Chapter 1

Mango 7.5
1.1 Introduction
Windows Phone 7.5 (codenamed 'Mango') is a major software update for Windows Phone, the mobile operating system by Microsoft. Although the OS internally identifies itself as version 7.1, it is marketed as version 7.5 in all published materials intended for end-users.The update was formally announced in New York on May 24, 2011, when Microsoft gave an in-depth preview of the update, shortly before which Steve Ballmer had disclosed that there would be over 500 features. Microsoft started rolling out Windows Phone 7.5 to both the United States and International markets on September 27, 2011. The first phones that came pre-loaded with Windows Phone 7.5 were released in the last quarter of 2011. The Windows Phone ecosystem just got more mature. With the release of Windows Phone 7.5 (aka "Mango"), developers have a whole lot of new features with which to build compelling applications. Many of these features are ones that Windows Phone developers directly clamored for.

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Chapter 2

Hardware Requirements

Almost every Windows Phone launched over the last year has been eerily similar in hardware specs, and most lack any significant customization. Microsoft exerts a lot of control over what equipment runs its star mobile OS (unlike, say, Google), and you're typically hard-pressed to find any large deviance between devices -- with the exception of handsets with physical QWERTY keyboards. None of that has changed with Mango, as Ballmer's Boys require a specific set of components. The hardware components used by all Windows Phone 7.5 devices are: 1. A Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU (new devices will use 8x55 or 7x30, though existing ones that use an 8x50 CPU will be supported as well) 2. DirectX graphics hardware support with hardware acceleration for Direct3D 3. A minimum of 384MB of RAM, at least 4GB of flash memory, WVGA (800 x 480) display resolution 4. A 3.5mm headphone jack, microUSB 2.0, WiFi 802.11 b / g support (n is optional) 5. FM radio 6. Bluetooth and at least four required sensors (with more optional).

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Chapter 3

User Interface

Fig 3.1: User Interface in Mango 7.5 One of Mango's more impressive feats is the fact that even with its myriad new features and functionality, it's nearly indistinguishable from its predecessor if you don't know exactly what to look for. This is because Microsoft's managed to preserve the signature.

Windows Phone features a new user interface, based upon Microsoft's Windows Phone design system, codenamed Metro. The home screen, called the "Start screen", is made up of "Live Tiles". Tiles are links to applications, features, functions and individual items (such as contacts, web pages, applications or media items). Users can add, rearrange, or

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Mango 7.5 remove Tiles. Tiles are dynamic and update in real time - for example, the tile for an email account would display the number of unread messages or a Tile could display a live update of the weather.

Several features of Windows Phone are organized into "hubs", which combine local and online content via Windows Phone's integration with popular social networks such as Facebook, Windows Live, and Twitter. For example, the Pictures hub shows photos captured with the device's camera and the user's Facebook photo albums, and the People hub shows contacts aggregated from multiple sources including Windows Live, Facebook, and Gmail. From the Hub, users can directly comment and 'like' on social network updates. The other built-in hubs are Music and Video (which integrates with Zune), Games (which integrates with Xbox Live), Windows Phone Marketplace, and Microsoft Office.

Windows Phone uses multi-touch technology. The default Windows Phone user interface has a dark theme that prolongs battery life on OLED screens as fully black pixels don't emit light. The user may choose a light theme instead, and can also choose from several accent colors.User interface elements such as tiles are shown in the user's chosen accent color. Third-party applications can be automatically themed with these colors. Live tiles have had several big improvements. Here are several of the most noteworthy ones: Live tiles now support in-app (or background agents) updating of the tiles through a new simple API. Live tiles now have a back that is occasionally shown and can contain additional information. You can have more than one live tile (called secondary tiles). Live tiles are nothing new in Mango, but they've definitely been given more freedoms. Before, apps from the Marketplace were "live," though they didn't have the ability to add much dynamic content. Now, more stuff can be pinned to the Start screen, including
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Mango 7.5 multiple tiles from the same single app (as an example, you could have five different eBay bid tiles featured on Start, or the weather from two separate cities); these tiles can all deep link to the app's content. Previously, only native tiles could flip over or offer dynamically updated information, whereas all third-party apps will now be able to take advantage of the same functionality. The tiles can also receive push notifications more frequently than before. All in all, the Start screen is much more alive with Mango, which only serves to enhance the Windows Phone mantra of "glance and go." As Microsoft sees it, the faster and easier it is to view vital info, the sooner you can get back to your life and
get important things done.

Once enough apps are installed on the phone, you'll notice letters popping up in the app menu, similar to the way they show up in the People Hub. The idea is that it's much easier to jump to the app you're looking for, instead of taking ages to scroll all the way down to find it.

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Chapter 4

Mango 7.5 Features

Windows Phone has an enormous amount of potential, but it's a first-generation operating system. For the first eleven months of its existence, it's lacked many of the common features on Android and iOS, but then again, even those platforms have taken their turn getting the major wrinkles ironed out. So it comes as no surprise that Microsoft's mobile darling -- the innovative rebirth of a weak and faltering Windows Mobile platform that was quickly falling into obscurity -- would need to go through a similarprocess.

The top 10 features of Windows Phone 7.5 are: 1. The Task Switcher 2. Dictate Text Messages To Your Phone 3. Unified Messaging 4. Multitasking 5. Groups 6. Linked E-Mail Inboxes 7. Battery Saver Mode 8. Improved Bing Search 9. Office and Exchange 10. Tap-To-Focus In Camera

4.1 The Task Switcher

Although tombstoning (the process of deactivating an app that a user navigates away from) gives the user a favorable experience of leaving and returning to applications, before Mango it was assumed that tombstoning might cause processes to go away more than was necessary on the phone. To rectify this issue, Mango supports fast task switching. This means that your application might not go away completely when the user interrupts it. The operating system is allowed to just pause your process (i.e., all threads

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Mango 7.5 are paused, all I/O is stopped), and if the user returns to it, the app could just "press play" on your process instead of asking you to rebuild your application's state.

Fig 4.1: Switching between multiple open apps/hubs is easy

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The task switcher brings utter fluidity to your navigation within the mobile environment. Now you dont have to use the home button again and again to go back to the app you were using before a text message came in. Just go to the task switcher (accessible from anywhere on the OS or a third-party app), and tap the app screen you were previously using. Switcher keeps your last 6 screens in a frozen state, and if an app supports background play, you can reach its current state from task switcher too.

4.2

Dictate Text Messages To Your Phone

Fig 4.2: convert voice to text This new feature of mango 7.5 takes voice control to a whole new level. Now you can speak to your phone and it will convert whatever you said into a text message! The results are awesome, and the utility is pretty accurate if you speak a bit slowly and with
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Mango 7.5 precision. You can dictate texts by tapping the microphone icon next to the send button in any messaging thread. The new messaging menu supports graphical emoticons, and unlike in Nodo (in which you were only allowed to share photos as attachments while texting) you can share music files too!

4.3

Unified Messaging
This feature missing in android and IOS phones but in this OS it comes as default

feature. It doesnt support third party applications like Google android. Here you cant add G talk chat application. But it allows users to unify all the communications with any person over face book, SMS, twitter at one place as the conversation. Facebook chat is now integrated with the messaging hub. You can set your chat status to online from the messenger button present in the SMS menu and a complete list of all your online contacts will be displayed. To switch back to texting a person instead of chat, each thread now includes a switching button.

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Fig 4.3:Threads help keep track of conversations, even if the individual messages came from different services.

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4.4

Multitasking
The biggest piece missing in Windows Phone prior to Mango for most

developers was the ability to run code in the background. You can now do this by using background agents. These agents come in four flavors:

Periodic agents -- Code that runs every 30 minutes (or so) to do short-lived processing

Resource-intensive agents -- Code that runs when the phone is being charged and on a non-cellular connection (e.g., Wi-Fi) for longer processing

Audio agents -- Code that interacts with the music player to support specifying what music is playing, going to the next/previous song in playlists, and so on

Streaming audio agents -- Code that actively handles streaming audio to the device (and decoding it) for audio apps that need to handle digital rights management (DRM) or authentication manually

Although these four options certainly do not solve all the background task use cases, they are meant to protect the user from badly behaving apps and affect the user's experience minimally. These agents live in a separate project that is shipped as a separate assembly as part of an application. The separate assembly is used to minimize the size of loading the background task into memory.

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Fig 4.4: Multitasking in Mango.

4.5

Groups
Mango gives you the ability to organize Groups within your People Hub --

whether it be family, co-workers, or particular cliques that you hang out with -- and interact with them all at the same time as if you were all meeting together in the same room. When a group is created, it shows up as its very own Hub, complete with three pivot screens that show live tiles for each individual member, notifications and pictures; here, you have the chance to email or text the entire group, or even pull up and comment / like their latest Facebook or Twitter updates without being distracted by other random statuses. You can also pin the group Hub to the Start screen, and the dynamic live tiles will bring up the latest notifications as well as pictures of each person.

This is one of our favorite enhancements in Mango because we tend to communicate with our co-workers, friends and family more than random contacts or old high school buddies on Facebook. And since we're constantly keeping in touch with them, it's even more important to find out what's going on in their lives and interact with them more than
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Mango 7.5 anyone else. Windows Phone has incorporated it seamlessly into the user experience, making the process quick and simple to set up and easy to enjoy.

Fig 4.5: Grouped contacts have their own news feeds.

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4.6

Linked E-Mail Inboxes

With so many integration options available to users now, it only make

sense to make these accounts as easily accessible as possible. Thats why you can now view your Google and Windows Live mailboxes as one. The option to connect accounts (after you have set up both) is present in the inboxs settings which slide up when you tap the three dots icon at the bottom of your Email menu. The procedure is exactly the same as linking two contacts.

Fig 4.6: Linked e-mail inboxes

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4.7

Battery Saver Mode

Battery life is one of the issues constantly haunting smartphone users. WP7 pays

special attention to it by introducing Battery Saver mode, which is present in the Settings menu. This mode automatically kills some battery-leaching tasks in the background and gives you a little extra battery time. In said mode, you can also see the exact percentage of your remaining battery, which was previously only possible through the diagnostic menu.

Fig 4.7: Battery saver mode

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4.8

Improved Bing Search

A quick press of the dedicated Search button on the bottom right of every

Windows Phone will take us into Bing Search, and Mango has added several enhancements to this area in a handy little toolbar at the bottom. The first is the aforementioned Local Scout, followed by Bing Music Search and Bing Vision. Bing Music is essentially Shazam: press the button, allow it 10 seconds or so to listen to the music, and boom we are shown results that list artist, song title and cover art. We can even proceed to the Marketplace to buy it.

Fig 4.8:Local Scout, a useful local search feature in Bing

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4.9

Office and Exchange

SkyDrive plays a much more important role in the Office as we can now easily

sync every type of document -- Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote -- between our phone and the cloud. Same goes with any folders that have been shared with us. All of this, in addition to Office 365 and SharePoint docs, can be found in the brand new Locations panel within the office app. Word and Excel together offer nine new document templates to help create our docs faster. Word now supports copy / paste and the ability to add comments to specific words or phrases, while Excel offers quick formulas such as sum, max, min and average.

Fig 4.9:Microsoft office and exchange in Mango Microsoft to turns in Mobile Office on windows phone 7.5. Now we can insert comments in Ms Word, Ms Excel and other MS Office Applications. One can sink all the files which sky drive for any time and from any place access.

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4.10 Tap-To-Focus In Camera

Every program in Windows Phone has been enhanced to be more customizable and increase the user's experience -- and the camera app is no different. It was already supremely easy to access, as it was designed to get us to the camera as quick as possible whenever an important capture-worthy moment's taking place.

Earlier versions of Windows Phone would lose settings upon exiting the camera app. This was a source of frustration, especially for video recording, where the camera would always revert back from 720p to VGA resolution. Mango remedies this by including a "Save settings" option in the camera menu. There's also the option to restore the default settings, should you get carried away tweaking things. We're also big fans of the twostage camera button required on all Windows Phone handsets, but sometimes it's better to avoid the potential motion blur associated with pressing a physical key. To this end, Mango introduces an on-screen shutter button -- just tap anywhere in the viewfinder to take a picture

Auto-fix

enhances

existing shots by adjusting brightness, contrast, color balance,

shadows and highlights with simple tap. Sometimes it makes a difference, but most of the time we'd rather have manual controls, something that's missing. In fact, Windows Phone still lacks any kind of basic image editing functionality, like cropping and rotation.

On some phones, Mango adds a wide dynamic range toggle to the camera settings. Unlike a true HDR mode that takes 3 pictures at different exposure levels, it appears to change the shadows and highlights when shooting a subject with a lot of backlight or when there's a large difference between the bright and dark areas in a scene. It's usually possible to achieve the same results using auto-fix after the fact.

Mango lets you tag people in pictures by tapping on their face and picking a contact from a list, or by typing someone's name directly. However, unlike the Facebook app, there's no way to fine-tune the position of the tag.

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Fig 4.10: Camera features

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Chapter 5

Miscellaneous improvements
5.1 Custom ringtones
Fortunately, custom tones made the list of 500 features, but with a twist: you can only get these custom tones by loading an MP3 or WMA clip no longer than 40 seconds into Zune, placing it into one of your music folders, right-clicking the tune in order to edit it and changing the song's Genre to "ringtone." Then simply sync to the phone, select the song in your device's settings.

5.2

Internet Sharing
Internet sharing, another way of describing the mobile hotspot feature, is now

included in all new Mango devices.

5.3

Video chat
Technically, video chat isn't one of the 500 promised features -- it's an API that

developers can take advantage of. But the inclusion of front-facing cameras in many new Mango devices gives us a feeling that we won't have to worry about a shortage of possible apps in this department.

5.4

Connect to hidden WiFi networks

This feature, as small and insignificant as it may seem, could be considered one

of the most important additions to Windows Phone, because of the affect it's previously had on corporations who purposely keep their WiFi networks hidden for privacy.

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5.5

Browser- Internet Explorer 9

With Mango comes Internet Explorer 9, which is greatly improved over its numero ocho because of its full support of HTML5, CSS3, SV, XHTML, DOM and others. Not only that, it throws in a faster JavaScript engine and hardware-accelerated graphics that use the phone's built-in GPU when rendering HTML5 animation or video. It also streamlines the toolbars to open up more screen space for each site, offers improved security, and runs each tab in a separate process so one site can't be responsible for crashing the entire browser. Microsoft tinkered with the interface, like moving the address bar to the bottom of the screen and hiding icons to increase the content real estate. GPU-powered hardware acceleration now renders content faster and more efficiently. Behind the scenes, IE9 jumps on board with the HTML5 Web standard . Indeed, the Samsung Focus with Mango loaded graphically rich pages significantly faster than the original Samsung Focus we placed right beside it in simultaneous tests on the same Wi-Fi network.

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Chapter 6

Mango 7.5: Pros, cons

Pros
Demerits duly noted, Microsoft has also clearly made an effort to add a little something extra, like the Bing Vision scanning feature, and App Connect. These are great ideas that mostly work out. Microsoft should be applauded for thinking outside the box, and for integrating features intelligently into the OS, rather than letting developers shoulder all the creative work. Then Microsoft should take a gracious little bow and get right back to work doing more.

Cons
It's true that many of the over 500 changes merely bring Mango up to speed with the competition, like the multitasking functionality and hot-spot support, the latter of which many people won't have a chance to tap into unless they have the compatible hardware to do so and their carriers say they can . It's also true that other "enhancements" were lackluster or fell short. Local Scout is a good idea, but the implementation is perhaps a bit shallow. Bing Vision search results are inconsistent, as is voice-to-text (admittedly a really hard feature to perfect). Another disadvantage is Mango kicks you from the Marketplace to either the app list or the Games Hub when you download an app. Microsoft has also remapped the search button below the screen to Bing, every time. It would preferable if this were contextual, searching for apps while in Marketplace, music in that hub, and so on.

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Conclusion
Windows Phone, as we know it, has an enormous amount of potential, but it's a firstgeneration operating system. For the first eleven months of its existence, it's lacked many of the common features on Android and iOS, but then again, even those platforms have taken their turn getting the major wrinkles ironed out. So it comes as no surprise that Microsoft's mobile darling -- the innovative rebirth of a weak and faltering Windows Mobile platform that was quickly falling into obscurity -- would need to go through a similar process.

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REFERENCES
Websites referred
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/howto/wp7/start/whats-new-inwindows-phone.aspx en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7.5

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