News · 1 Jul 2011 · MTW Editorial Team
Microsoft has just updated the Mango dev Beta NDA terms a few minutes ago allowing developers to comment and talk publicly about it.
8. Confidentiality: By participating in this program, the developer agrees to not to share the ‘Mango’ pre-release device image, binary dumps, or the applications used to update to this pre-release image, with third parties.
So here are some of my findings after using it for more than 24 hours and frankly I’m surprised that some of these things haven’t been reported (unless I didn’t pay attention..) yet even in the “press reviews” given that I noticed a few of them only a few minutes after booting up Mango for the first time on the Samsung Omnia 7 :
1) Internet Explorer 9 Mobile now supports color dithering. So there’s no more banding seen in images.
2) Color Dithering is now applied through-out the OS so there’s no more banding on the Lock-screen images, Bing daily images, Music+Video hub background image and Picture hub background image.
3) Improved color dithering in the Zune video player (and also enable for the MediaElement control)
4) Shooting 720P videos is now smoother on the Omnia 7 (same on Focus I guess)
5) The Camera app doesn’t support touch focus as we know it. Touching the screen will only center focus and trigger the shutter, you can’t choose the focus location with your finger.
6) It’s now possible to download the images embedded in HTML emails when only connected to the cell network (pre-Mango it only worked on WiFi for me)
7) During a Live Messenger chat, only replies to messages sent from the phone are pushed to the phone. This means that if I type something on Messenger via the PC and the contact replies to it his message won’t arrive on the phone, but if I send a message via the phone then the subsequent answer will be pushed to the phone. This is IMO kinda dumb because the whole threaded conversion found the phone will be missing some messages (thanks to M.J Foley for the help here 
). This can change before RTM thought…
8 ) the Voice-to-text TellMe system for text messages and chat messaging apparently censors “bad words”: Pimps = ##&## etc..
9) Embedded Youtube videos now work when the phone is not set to US
10) Bing Voice search now works in other languages (French for example)
There’s still a lot to talk about but this is all for now and don’t forget to regularly check out my full list of Mango features which I update on a daily basis.
Buyer action
Where to buy or check next
Use this as the final check before ordering a phone, changing network or trusting a headline monthly price.
