Turn-by-Turn Navigation, Barcode Scanning & More in Windows Phone’s Next Big Update

“Mango,” the next major update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system, will include several notable enhancements for consumers, including turn-by-turn navigation, built-in barcode scanning, voice-to-text speech input, on-device podcast support and a music identification service similar to the popular mobile application Shazam, but available within Bing. Mango, also known as Windows Phone 7.5, is due out this fall.

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At Microsoft’s recent MIX ’11 conference in Las Vegas, the company detailed many of Mango’s features aimed at developers such as multi-tasking, improvements to the phone’s Live Tiles (the square-shaped homescreen informational hubs) and deeper access to the phone’s hardware and services, like contacts and calendar, plus sensors like the accelerometer and camera.

While those announcements will have a direct impact on how an end user perceives the Windows Phone mobile operating system (OS) itself, the news was more targeted towards developers attending the conference, not the mainstream audience.

But in a recent Windows Phone Dev Podcast, hosted by Ryan and Travis Lowerdermilk, and featuring special guest Brandon Watson, Director of Developer Experience at Microsoft, it was revealed that a number front-end, consumer-facing features are making their way into the Mango update, too.

What’s New in Mango for Consumers

According to Watson, these include the following:

Bing Audio: A music search feature built into Bing allows you to hold up your phone to a music source to identify the song being played. This is very much how Shazam works, a popular mobile phone application found on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android, Nokia, BlackBerry and even Windows Phone 7 devices.
Bing Vision: This image scanner will use the phone’s camera to read barcodes, QR codes, Microsoft Tags, plus it can “see” books, CD’s, DVD’s and text, the latter using OCR. This feature has actually been present in Bing iPhone application for some time.
Turn-by-Turn Navigation: In a move that seems very competitive with Google’s Android mobile OS, Mango will deliver turn-by-turn navigation to Windows Phone users which includes voice guidance during driving directions.

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SMS Dictation: Also included is SMS dictation – the ability to speak into the microphone to have your words transcribed into text messages.

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On-device Podcast Support: This much-needed feature will allow users to search for, download and subscribe to podcasts from the device itself.

Why Mango Matters: Windows Phone Not Powerful Enough Today

For what it’s worth, I’ve spent some time using the Windows Phone 7 on an HTC HD7 as of late, and have found the experience wanting.

See ongoing series: Windows Phone 7 is Beautiful, But is it Usable; Using Windows Phone 7: One Week with an HD7; Using Windows Phone 7: Differences for Mac & PC Users,

While I appreciate the design, ease-of-use and elegance of the Windows Phone platform as it exists today, without multi-tasking, notifications and the feature-rich Google experiences I’ve become accustomed to on Android (and even iPhone), my overall feeling is that Windows Phone is simply incomplete at present. That advice, however, comes with a big caveat: Mango will change a lot of what’s currently wrong with Windows Phone today. It will rapidly bring the platform up to speed with its competitors, and the advancements to Bing itself, which are deeply embedded in the platform, are shaping up to be a viable alternative to Google search.

I still prefer Google Maps and Places to anything Bing offers, I have to admit. I’m not sold on the “prettier” interface Microsoft introduced to Bing Maps back in 2010. In fact, I sort of hate it, if I’m being honest. I find it harder to read, and harder to use than Google Maps.

That said, overall, Bing has a lot of interesting features these days, including its deal-finder Bing Deals, integrations with 360-image stitching service Photosynth, social search capabilities and much more. Although much of Bing’s market share gains in search have been bought and paid for, the service has been slowly inching up, and, as of April 2011, now accounts for 30% of the U.S. search market. While Google is being criticized for being overrun by content farms and the low-quality results they provide, Microsoft promotes Bing as a place where you can quickly find the results you need. In practice, Bing has not yet proven itself to be a “Google killer” – depending on your search, results may be better, equal to or worse than Google’s, I’ve found. But it’s a rapidly improving service, and one whose integrations into mobile allow for more opportunity in market share gains.