Bing!

Well the title says it all! Bing is getting some great improvements in Mango! We'll get access to "Bing Vision", "Bing Audio", Turn by turn voice navigation and the new "Bing indoor maps"!

Bing vision is kind of neat, it's a lot like google goggles if anyone who reads this blog has played with that. it will let us scan bar codes, QR codes and Microsoft Tags. It will let us take a picture of a DVD, or book, or movie poster and then search Bing for things that relate to said object (like buying it on amazon).

Bing audio is a bit more of a mystery from what people can tell it's like Shazaam or Midomi and you hold your phone near a speaker and it tells you the song that's playing. Wonder if it will tie in with the Zune marketplace so you can find a song then download that song right from inside Bing. That would be swell.

Turn by turn voice navigation for Bing maps will be mighty handy. Don't think I need to go into too much detail here I'm sure everyone has seen a GPS before.

Finally there's the new Bing indoor maps. Ever go to a mall and wander around in circles about five or six times wondering where the hell EB Games is? No more! Bing fixes this (at least in the states at the moment, nothing good ever makes it up here to canada) You will be able to pull up an indoor map of most shopping centers complete with where the different stores are. That's pretty damn cool.

More power to the Peoples hub!

Mangos done it! Its finally done it! You know in the future... The Peoples hub is good now! Its not just a list and a Facebook status list now (read Now as 'When mango launches')

The peoples hub is getting a LOT of work done to it, a whole series of improvements and face lifts. So much so even Michael Jackson would be jealous! First off, Twitter is now there so you get to see something other then just Facebook statuses!

Next on the Awesome List is the option for groups! You can create groups of contacts in the peoples hub now, Friends, Coworkers, Family, friends of mine who own Windows Phones, Whatever you want. What this new group lets you do is have a single place to check Facebook, Windows live and Twitter updates of all of the people in the group in a single "Whats new" window. It has its on area of the hub for Pictures the group has posted to Windows live and Facebook. Lastly you can see updates, peoples check-ins, missed calls (voicemail too), texts, and emails from these people.

Cool stuff!

Know what else they fixed? Hint its similar.....

The Me hub! It now actually has a purpose now! Basically it has all the features of a group, but just you're there. So its an amalgamated area for missed calls, texts, emails, check ins... You can set your IM status so people can chat at you from MSN or Facebook. You can see all your Facebook notifications so you can clue in when Someones posted a comment on a photo of yours.

Actually www.winrumours.com has a very nice video showing all of the above right... Here

App list

Just a tiny feature added but a great one. If your app list is getting very long (much like mine) Mango makes launching the app you're actually looking for so much easier. Once you get over 45 apps, the app list to the right of your home page will actually get the little letter headers like in the people hub. You know that thing where you tap a letter, it shows you the alphabet, you choose "s" and suddenly you're looking at Sam, Sandy, Sarah, Sue, etc? So launching BloghuB I just need hit the B and bingo bango bongo its there!

Also they're adding a search feature so if I have an exorbitantly high number of apps and don't want to have to scroll through my WHOLE "b" section I need only type the first few letters of the app I'm after and, guess what...

..

.

no really guess...


Yes! You're right! It shows you the app you're after and you can tap to launch! You know, just like the iPhones spotlight search, or vista/windows 7's "Start Bar". Who cares who had it first all that matters is we have it now.. Erm.. Will have it in September? October? Whenever this damned update actually goes live. Man do I want that to be tommorow...

Messaging hub changes!

As you might have guessed from yesterdays blog post. Today's mango feature is the new improved and very shiny Messages hub! Now when you go to the messages hub and start a conversation with someone you now have the added options of messaging them over MSN if they're online there. Over Facebook chat, if they happen to be on Facebook, or if they're offline on both MSN and Facebook (they might be dead if that's the case with my friends) all messages sent will instead be sent as text messages! If they suddenly come back online on either service without having to do anything any of your messages will go to these instead!

The neat thing here is you get to keep the WHOLE conversation (not just snippets that happened to be the texting part) in your threaded messaging hub all together. The only thing I'm confused about is if they are both online on Facebook and on MSN at the same time I'm assuming that we will have a choice of WHICH to message them on and don't spam them from both sides at once (now doesn't that sound unpleasant.... )

Man hubs rock don't they?

It's here! It's finally here!

My HTC HD7 has finally arrived and I am so far loving it the UI is super responsive, the web browser is nice and snappy and pinch to zoom is SO FLUID it's unbelievable! I'll get into some more indepth reviews later on but for now theres just a couple things I wanna say I love...

1) Wireless sync with Zune software, no need to plug it into my comp to sync which, with my limited USB slots, is one hell of a boon no more need to unplug my printer to put media on my phone.

2) The super LCD screen is quite frankly gorgeous. Really crisp and clear with vibrant color, not quite as high contrast ratio as my friends Galaxy S's SAMOLED screen but its a huge leap past the standard amoled on my old Omnia I8000.

3) Xbox Live support - Havn't gone too in depth into this yet but so far its been useful was playing with my phone when I noticed somone on Live wanted me to join them in Black Ops, just one more way the phone is described as a "Social genius"

4) The peoples hub. I know android has this too but coming from an iphone and WM6.5 it has brought a smile to my face almost every time I pick up my phone. Have my girlfriend and friends Facebook pages on my homepage who post a LOT being able to see the comment and post on it without having to launch a dedicated app is wonderful.

Anyways, I'll leave the rest for later! Off to enjoy my phone!