More Mango Features Emerge

As we get closer to the official release of the first major update for Microsoft's Windows Phone OS, more details of features are emerging, and some of them are looking extremely useful indeed.

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.