You know when you’ve been Mango’d
The next major release of Windows Phone 7 is out, and to my enormous surprise, has actually made it to my phone remarkably quickly. I haven’t totally got my head around all the new bits yet, but so far all seems well, and the good outweighs the bad, which is nice.
Good stuff found so far:
- Tasks now synchronise with Exchange again! The curmudgeon in me says “As they should all along”, but at least it’s fixed now, and I’m trying to practice this positivity thing. OK, they hid them in with the calendar app, so I didn’t realise for a little while, but excuse me whilst I do a little Happy Dance
- the UI has had loads of minor tweaks, most of which are actually quite helpful (recent stuff rising to the top, more shortcuts to speed things up, inclusion of a task switcher so you can leave stuff open and move around between apps/screens more quickly etc.)
- messaging integration is, on the whole better, with Live, Facebook, Twitter etc. all having aggregate feeds as well as their standalone versions
- there’s an option for threading in Outlook. OK, it’s not great, and can be a bit random, and it’s not proper threading (only (ex)Cixen will probably get that) but at least it’s an option. Although I’ve turned it back off, as it was a bit weird
Less good stuff:
- they’ve taken the Folders button off the quick set in Outlook, so it’s now two taps away, not one. Grr. Just because most people are moron enough to have everything hit the Inbox and then move it manually; some of us actually know how to use server-side rules, and therefore need to be able to get to our folder list quickly to scan for new messages
- in fact, while we’re at it, we does Outlook still only trigger a new message counter for the Inbox? Why can’t it scan all of the synchronised folders and stick a counter up, with a quick aggregate “unread” view? Particularly as the ‘thread’ option shows that they can pull data from disparate folders into one view if they want to
Still, one major gripe from my first exposure fixed for definite, and lots of little improvements. I think I’m likely to be a happy bunny for a while. Now I just need to hunt down a definitive list of what’s changed/been added in Mango, in case I’m missing any of the really good bits.