The first update of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) will bring a host of features to the operating system including Windows Live Messenger, Facebook Chat, AOL IM, Office 365 support, group messaging, artist-on lock screen, Wifi hotspot support, and visual voicemail.
This has been revealed by a website called Windows Phone Dev Podcastshows.
Microsoft is going to update its Windows Phone 7 in the coming months. After the Mango update, the platform will likely be renamed WP7.5 or WP8.
Support for Office 365, a cloud based Office application, will make the device more enterprise friendly, while added Messaging features will make it better for social networking.
The hotspot feature, which is already available in Android 2.2 and newer devices, will mean that you can share your 3G connection with Wifi enabled devices around you.
Apart from these new features, multitasking, a hardware-accelerated mobile version of Internet Explorer 9, Twitter in the People hub, better support for Office documents in SkyDrive (Microsoft’s free cloud-based storage service) and more has already been announced.
The motion sensor library will also be accessible to developers so that users can expect better augmented reality apps in future.
The upgrade will support music players irrespective of whether they are apps or in the browser. This means that music will play in the background even as users do other things on their phone.
Microsoft’s upgraded Bing search engine is also likely to come with the Mango update. The updated search engine will have several additional features including Bing Audio. It will display the name of the title, artist etc. and will provide a link to the Zune store (Windows phone 7 applications market) for purchasing music.
Microsoft has already got Nokia on its side and with these additional features being brought in through the Mango update, the operating system might be able to emerge as a big challenger to Android and iOS (Apple iPhone OS).