More Windows Phone 7.5 Mango consumer features revealed – Messenger in People Hub confirmed

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango with Chinese supportIt seems like today is “Mango” day, with several sources leaking information about the Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” update. Earlier today via a podcast Ryan and Travis Lowdermilk revealed several consumer features coming in “Mango” – including Bing Vision, Bing Audio, Turn-by-turn Bing Maps navigation, and SMS Dictation. It seems like a Chinese developer on Cnblogs.com also got their hands on the latest bits of the “Mango” beta, apparently currently only available to limited friends and families of Softies working on WP7.

While the post is in Chinese, we were able to summarise the new (and some already known) features revealed on the post:

  • East Asian Language Keyboard, Handwriting and Dictionary Support
    East Asian Language KeyboardEast Asian Language Handwriting supportEast Asian Language dictionary suggestions
  • Improved SkyDrive sync in Office hub – adding Word, Excel, and PowerPoint sync support. Each document type will now be indicated by the color of the tile:
    Office hub with colored tiles
  • Bing Image Search, Bing Vision, and Bing Audio – besides Bing Vision and Bing Audio as revealed earlier this morning, it seems like Bing will now feature Image Search as well.
  • Windows Live Messenger integrated in People hub – as we have predicted earlier, the Chinese developer confirms that Windows Live Messenger will be integrated in the People hub. You will be able to directly IM someone on your contact list.
  • Internet Explorer 9 Mobile HTML5 support – not surprisingly, according to the Chinese developer, IE9 Mobile is scoring same score as the desktop version on HTML5Test.com
  • Multi-tasking – as shown in the screenshot below, besides individual applications, each tab in IE9 Mobile will also be shown as a separate task in the task-switching screen:
    Task switcher showing multiple IE tabs

With the Mango SDK (with a new emulator) due to be released very soon, it won’t be surprising that more details will be revealed. We wonder what’s else is in store for “Mango”?

Update: Seems like the original poster Wonderow has pulled the post on his Chinese blog. However, according to @WindowsPhone8 on Twitter, who also confirmed the news about Messenger in People hub:

[blackbirdpie id=”67550611301859328″]

This tweeter had been quite accurate with his Windows Phone predictions, who correctly tipped WPCentral details about the upcoming “Mango” update ahead of the MIX11 conference, adding some credibility to his tweets. We’ll see how this one goes.