back to article MS announces Windows Phone 7.1

It's official: Windows Phone 7.1 - aka 'Mango' - will be out in the autumn. Well, that's when the first phones should get it, but as we've seen with the - still ongoing - WinPho 7 copy'n'paste update, it may be a while before every vendor's handset is switched over. Microsoft discussed a lot of Mango's 'under the hood' …

COMMENTS

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  1. advocate
    Pint

    features on my wish list

    - tethering, either remote or by usb but please unlock it!

    - ability to remove facebook contact details (some of my friends have old phone numbers in their profiles etc and it gets confusing)

    - flash

    - shockwave

    If you can get me those I will be very happy.

    Pint for the developers that tick all the boxes.

    1. Jim Coleman
      Thumb Up

      well....

      Tethering - Lots of remours say it is in Mango but not seen confirmation

      Facebook - That's your friends' fault, not MSs

      Flash / Shockwave - Third parties, again not MS.

      Personally I'm mostly interested in the Skydrive sync, which definitely is in there, and Turn-by-turn spoken navigation, which I'm not of yet

      1. advocate

        agree mostly

        Re - Facebook, alright lets take the lazy friends out of the equation. integration is provided by the winpho software and it doesn't allow for any alteration of contacts. I personally have under 70 people on my "friends" list, some of them live in America and I don't ever call them on their phones, why won't microsoft let me delete their entry from my contacts list?

        RE - Flash/Shockwave - I meant to write silverlight not shockwave.... silverlight is very much a microsoft thingy no?

        Re Turn by turn navigation - You reminded me of another bugbear of mine, Bing maps. It just plain sucks - in fact bing everything on the phone sucks - I realise this will come down to a 3rd party app and the hardware/homepage integration will never be allowed but damn I would love the silly search button to link to google and the maps software to be google maps instead.

        1. MN

          Microsoft *will* let you remove them from your contacts list.

          Settings -> swipe to 'applications' -> people -> 'Only add Facebook information to existing contacts'. No apologetics needed.

          Also, I imagine that Bing maps will be replaced by Nokia's, which is widely considered to be the best around.

          I don't think Flash/Silverlight will be included in Mango, no.

          1. advocate

            only partly correct

            you can tell it to not sync people from FB who aren't in contacts (thanks for that, just did it and got rid of some of the Yankees) but it won't let you edit any of the details that it pulls from elsewhere and it wont let you link live accounts to each other (I have some friends who have a few different live accounts for whatever reason) = messy people page.

            on the dev blog: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2011/05/24/developer-news-beta-mango-tools-available-today.aspx

            it does say that silverlight 4 is being bundled with the update, hopefully that will meant that the IE9 browser with the bundle will also get silverlight.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Silverlight is included

            Currently the light version of Flash is on there not the full version. As for Silverlight, definitely on there, that is what most of the App's are written in.

            Nokia maps and other location based services will 'replace' Bing maps. Though on non-Nokia devices Nokia Maps are likely to be called Bing Maps, and proably lack some premium functions found on Nokia devices.

      2. Kevin Bailey

        friends fault re old phone numbers...

        Yes. It's the friends fault. But Android deals with this elegantly with a single tick box.

        Yet another example of MS and their apologists expecting the real world to conform to their software and not the other way around.

  2. Jim Coleman
    Thumb Up

    :O)

    <Bill and Ted>EXCELLENT!</Bill and Ted>

  3. Ian Ferguson
    Gates Horns

    Photoshopping

    Slightly concerning that they're talking it up now but apparently using mocked-up screenshots of basic functions. (look at the timestamps of the messages - alternately using 'p' and 'P' for 'pm')

    Unless that's a feature, not a bug, naturally.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Spotted!

      You win this months Eye of an Eagle(TM) award.

  4. JDX Gold badge

    actually...

    For those who love Facebook, WP7 actually sounds pretty good. Not my thing but the public lap it up.

    Are MS allowed to 'pay' shops to push WP7 on cheaper deals than Android, etc? Such tricks might be effective, it needs a critical mass to take off however good it is.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Gates Horns

      Re: actually...

      "Are MS allowed to 'pay' shops to push WP7 on cheaper deals than Android, etc?"

      Given previous regulatory intervention, probably not, although I imagine that such kickbacks are pervasive. Microsoft would have set up an all-you-can-eat grill at the feeding of the five thousand just to put Jesus out of business, such is their ethical track record.

  5. Julian 3
    Gates Horns

    Better late than never....

    At least Microsoft are doing updates for Windows Phone 7. Unlike Windows Mobile users who were just left to suffer the OS it was shipped with :(

    Microsoft should have been ahead of the game but they squander it all and are left playing catch up.

  6. Gareth Gouldstone
    Happy

    Dissuage

    Most dictionaries don't define it. It sounds like a portmanteau of dissuade and assuage; to reduce the pain of discouragement, perhaps?

  7. petur
    FAIL

    Unified inboxes et al

    Yes, I'm really waiting for my private and work e-mails to be mangled in one blob. Is this because the other idiots (Apple) decided on this?

    It might work for SMS/IM though....

  8. Dave Edge
    FAIL

    Local Databases?

    STILL no mention of local database support! Grrrr.

    (And no, I don't want to use Azure etc)

    1. Fuzz

      Local databases are in

      check the 7.1 beta dev tools, SQL CE is available.

  9. Alien Doctor 1.1

    NEWSFLASH

    Microsoft today announced a new version of fucking crap to be uploaded to all existing fucking worthless pieces of shit and it will also be pre-installed onto the newest item of wank you'll ever buy.

    When asked about the exciting new release Steve Ballmer smiled and rang his broker - please note, no chairs were harmed during the interview.

    After the initial furore had subsided other journalists at the event were surprised to see a certain William Gates in attendance: after brief conversations with Wired and Penthouse, Mr Gates was heard to utter the possibly prophetic words "fuck me is Steve really that fat and bald?"

    We are now awaiting the evening sessions were I believe Sony executives may perform hara-kiri while rendering a beautiful karaoke of "I Will Survive".

    1. Alien Doctor 1.1

      Damn

      I dropped an aitch; bugger: now I probably look like a right tosser.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Well

        I think you have made a sterling job of achieving that all with or without dropping a letter.

    2. Alien Doctor 1.1

      must contain letters and/or digits; here are a few digits...

      In a further and late breaking newsflash, it has been determined that certain negative posters on the El Reg website may in fact, and please don't take any hasty actions, are actually Microsoft shills. When questioned, the OP admitted to using a Microsoft OS but hastily denied it was Vista or any form of Ubuntu prior to 11.04.

      Please see our late breaking news after a sci-fi series that we'll cancel just as you begin to like it.

  10. Paul Shirley
    Jobs Horns

    it all looks so.... ginger!

    The ginger step child of the phone world ;)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Down

      You are probably looking at the Orange branding

      Let me guess...

      You are looking at (Agent) Orange branding. The O2 one will be toxic blue, the Vodafone blood red and I do not want to think what color scheme 3 will chose.

      1. Paul Shirley

        It's always orange. Except when its hideously green.

        Well, I can't remember seeing any WP7 media that doesn't feature heavy doses of orange (can't stand the colour) and green (only looks good on plants). Be fun in Orange tried suing them for stealing the Orange look&feel (errr.. that would be 'Orange' and 'crap')

        ;)

  11. JeeBee
    WTF?

    Still don't like the headings...

    This is a goo

    but I do find th

    font issues wi

    headings to b

    very annoyin

    1. hplasm
      Thumb Up

      They still use Word

      for the graphics then?

  12. Neil 7
    FAIL

    The WP7 UI is beginning to look ever more of a mess

    with every update...

    What an absolute horror.

  13. RobE
    Stop

    How about Windows....

    Why dont they market this as something truely new and call it Windows 9 or 10, rather than windows 7 which will seem old by the time november swings by. Stop and think about this M$.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Features

    How about turning on my frikkin compass?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Err...

      Compass has been on for a while now, I've had a compass app on mine for at least a month, although I believe it's been around much longer.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Is it just me...

    ...or do all the screen shots for WP7 seem to have very little actual content on them? Look at those two screen shots - all those big coloured blobs but the information makes up what 3% of the total screen space and the rest is just fluff. I DON'T need to see a picture of my wife by a message that tells me I've missed a call from her.

    1. hplasm
      WTF?

      Agreed.

      It's like a Hollywood UI.

  16. tom 24
    Happy

    Version... 7.1?

    I still don't quite understand why the first version of Windows Phone is called 7.

    Well, that's not true... I *do* understand: they're ashamed of version 1 because of past performance. Everyone knows that version 1 of anything Microsoft releases is incomplete and generally to-be-avoided, version 2 is probably useful but not complete, and version 3 is probably worth buying. So they call it "7" to confuse us and give us the impression that it's somehow as mature as Windows 7. But of course that doesn't work. All this means is that we will wait for Windows Phone 10 and then go queue up to buy one. It's not difficult math. What, do they think consumers are stupid?

    Oh, right. Never mind.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    That UI is f*cking foul.

    Mine's the coat with a UMPC (not a smartphone) in the pocket, with the Start menu set to classic mode.

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