This is not a widely advertised feature though and there’s no information before, during or after you update your phone to even let you know it exists.  I thought, with my new found ability to get screenshots on my own Windows Phone, that I’d write a short tutorial here for you on how to use this very useful, if not essential, new feature.

1)     Firstly you want to open Settings from the main apps menu

2)     When in the main settings panel, open Lock + Wallpaper

3)     You should now turn on the Password feature for the operating system

4)     Windows Phone will now ask you to enter a passcode, this will always be a numeric value.

5)     When you’re returned to the main Lock + Wallpaper screen, scroll to the very bottom of the screen and tab Require a Password After

6)     You can now select how long a period of time will pass, of up to 30 minutes, before Windows Phone activates the passcode.  Personally I prefer 30 minutes as the others are perhaps a bit short.  With this set you can check your phone regularly without having to worry it will lock you out and require the passcode to be entered every time.  However you will know that if you lose your phone it is very likely that the passcode will automatically turn on to protect your contacts, emails and files.

7)     It’s always a good idea to check the settings have been accepted afterwards.  Here you can see it’s accepted my 30 minute delay on the lock.

I can’t recommend enough that you turn on a passcode for your Windows Phone (or iPhone or Android Phone or Symbian Phone etc.) as we’re all now carrying around increasingly large volumes of data with us.

For example, Windows Phone 7.5 now allows you to easily access any files and documents you may have stored in Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage service.  On mine I have all manner of word processor and spreadsheet documents, some of which contain personal and sensitive information.  It’s extremely useful being able to access these files on the move, but critical to know they’re also secure all of the time.  Even if this feature had been in the previous version of Windows Phone, I never would have used it without a good, strong password on the handset.

It can be royally annoying though when a phone asks you to enter your password every single time you pick it up, especially when you’re only doing something simple such as checking your email or updating Facebook.  With this new feature activated you can rest assured that your phone and data will always be safe… well, after 30 minutes anyway.

Here you can update and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents you have stored in the cloud and it’s the one feature I’ve been looking forward to the most.  I have for many years had spreadsheets that I want to use on the move and used this facility as far back at the late 90′s with handheld computers like the Psion Series 3.  Needless to say then I found that the omission of this feature from Windows Phone at launch, and the inability to be able to transfer and sync documents with PCs made the Office hub almost completely unusable for me, and a waste of time.

Now though I have full access to these spreadsheets.  I’ve stored them on SkyDrive ever since I first installed Office 2010 on my PCs.  The main reason for doing this was security, with the files not actually residing on my computers and hidden behind a password and encryption there, the theft of anything from my home wouldn’t reveal personal and critical financial data to others.  How could anyone resist the opportunity to make their financial data so secure!?  There was also the added benefit of having access to these spreadsheets on any device and from anywhere in the world.  This is something I have also found extremely useful when on trips and holidays.

What I really wanted though was to be able to carry these files around with me too, on my smartphone.  After all, this is what a smartphone is for isn’t it?

You would imagine then that now I have achieved spreadsheet nirvana I would be ecstatic and as happy as happy can be.  You might be surprised then to hear that I’m feeling quite the contrary.  In fact I’m now deeply concerned about the security of these files, and it all comes down the lack of adequate security features in the smartphone OS itself.

Now I won’t speak about iOS or Android here, though all smartphone and tablet operating systems have got some faults in this area.  I’ll concentrate here on Windows Phone.  With this operating system you have a simple choice between ease of use and secure and safe, but sadly it’s very difficult to have both together.

What upsets me so much is that true spreadsheet nirvana for me would be an incredibly simple thing to achieve, if only Microsoft would put in one or two tiny little features to the main lock screen on the OS and one more feature to their Office Live platform.

At the moment the way things stand is like this.  You have a choice of either a lock screen that you swipe up to unlock the phone, or a lock screen that swipes up to reveal a numeric keypad onto which you have to type a code.  The latter of these two options is fully secure but the former will just allow anybody access to all your files and data.

You would imagine then that I would have my phone behind a password, to be safe and secure.  I don’t do this though as I use my smartphone an lot, an awful lot in fact and for a great many different things.  The process of having to swipe the lock screen up and then type in a password is annoying, cumbersome and frankly too much to ask people to do.

This makes me think of Android phones I have used where unlocking the phone involves swiping your finger across the screen to make a pattern that you yourself can set.  This is what I would call secure and with this I would be very happy.  A very similar feature to this is being added to Windows 8, or so it appears, but so far (and we should remember that Mango is still in beta, though Microsoft have a history of only releasing ‘near final’ betas these days) there’s no similar feature in Mango at all.

What Mango does bring to the table is the option to only ask for the password after X minutes of inactivity.  The options only go up to 30 minutes however, which may seem fair enough.  It is at least a huge improvement over what we had before.  It’s not configurable enough for many people though and will need to be looked at.

Then there’s the problem that the phone will automatically show, on it’s Office hub main page, links to every file and document I store in Microsoft’s cloud services.  There’s no option to hide any or just show some.  It’s all or nothing with this OS!

The other problem resides with Microsoft’s Office Live service.  This service is still failing to support passwords on documents.  This would make the problem go away for me (though it still wouldn’t sort out everything else on my phone being easily accessible to a thief).  This means that anyone clicking a link to a file on my phone will find that the file just opens for them, straight away and without worry.

It amazes me then that security on Smartphones is still not being given the importance by many companies that it truly deserves.  We’re all doing more and more with our smartphones these days and many people are literally carrying their entire lives around in their pockets, unsecured and open to theft and abuse by anyone that finds or steals the handset.

This situation has simply got to change, and change quickly.  If Microsoft, Apple and Google are ever going to convince the world, especially business, that their smartphone platforms are ‘the way forward’ then they need to bring security front and centre.  Unless and until this happens we’re all in trouble.

The expanded features list comes courtesy of WPSauce.com and includes…

• AppChecker - a feature that will find appropriate applications in the marketplace to enable you to open X or Y file type that isn’t supported either natively by the device or by the software you have pre-installed.
• A special Battery Saving Mode which will be a boon for road warriors.  The phone will be able to be set to go into a special low-power mode when the battery reaches a certain percentage.  This will cut off apps, stop the syncing of emails and more to help conserve the life of the handset.
• Deeper Facebook Integration which will be very welcome along with the addition of support for Twitter and LinkedIn.  This will include such things as check-ins and events which will be piped through to your people hub and your calendar.
• Better Email features include threaded conversations and the ability to flag emails.
• The Calendar gets support for lunar dates to help the phone expand sales in Asia.
• Messaging gets additional features too including nudging people and multi-party conversations.
• It’s Office where some of the biggest and most welcome changes are taking place.  In addition to Skydrive support there will be Microsoft’s new Lync communications platform coming to the app store.
• Finally Connectivity gets a major boost with support for manual IP address setting (essential in business) and far better networking support, including the ability to join hidden wifi networks.  There will be no VPN support in this update however.

There’s little doubt that nearer the time to the final release of the software there will be much more to pour over in this update, and it’ll be a big one.  Possibly the one that brings this smartphone platform into the mainstream.

Much of this will rest on how successful Microsoft are in fixing the problems with business support including issues with Exchange usernames and Outlook syncing.

Most of the content on the website is audio content which can be downloaded as mp3 files to the local computer and from there on the mp3 player so that you could learn on the trip.

You also find Grammar Tips and interactive games that test your language skills. The quality of the spoken language is excellent but the courses remain pretty basic from what I can tell. I think it’s a great way to get a first impression of a language but one has to use additional courses to fully understand a language.

I personally prefer Mango over BBC Languages.

The beta version of Mango is open to all users but language courses are only provided to English speaking users. Once signed in users can select from eleven different languages including Japanese, German, Mandarine Chinese , Spanish, French and Russian. All courses are divided into several lessons which are made up of sheets each.

The Japanese language course for instance is made up of 101 lessons, the first lesson of the course has 91 sheets which are called slides here.

Each slide takes up one sheet which means information are separated to concentrate on the important aspects. I was first a little bit worried because the Japanese course began with a conversation that was only displaying Japanese characters which I could not understand.

Luckily those characters were all explained on later slides of that language lesson. I really liked how this was done. The English meaning first, below the Japanese letters and a Japanese speaker who pronounces the words. Everything can be replaced immediately and if you move the mouse over a Japanese word you get an overlay showing how the word is pronounced.

That help does not use the International Phonetic Alphabet but a simply English word of the Japanese characters. Still really helpful to get it right at the beginning.

Several slides contain important information about basic language concepts. Others ask the user a question which he has to answer (for himself) in a time given.

For example. The first sentence that you learn is “Hello ! How are you.” After showing and pronouncing these words in Japanese and giving the user background information the user is asked what Hello and afterwards what How are you means in Japanese. This is shown after a certain time so that the user exactly knows if he was right or wrong.

Speakers seem to be professionals only. I took a look at the German language course as well and it seems that all courses have the same setup. A difference in the German course is that they use colors to show which English word belongs to which German word and explain what it would mean literally.

Mango is in my opinion an excellent online language course which I will be using to learn at least Japanese. Something which I always wanted to do but never had the motivation to do. I hated those book courses with tapes or CDs which were just to uncomfortable to use.

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