Microsoft showed off some of the 500 new features it says are coming in the first major update to Windows Phone 7 (WP7), codenamed “Mango,” next fall during a gala preview event in New York Tuesday.
Among the 500 new features promised in Mango at the event, many key additions will be focused around providing tighter integration between the operating system and the phone apps — “blurring the lines” between the phone and the apps, as Andy Lees, president of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Mobile Communications Business put it during his New York presentation.
“The smartphone experience can be complicated by a sea of disconnected apps and accounts as people attempt to keep pace with all the ways they communicate — from calls, texts, email and instant messages (IM) to status updates, Tweets, check-ins, photo posting and tagging,” the company said in a statement. “To help people stay on top of that growing complexity, the ‘Mango’ release organizes information around the person or group people want to interact with, not the app they have to use.”