Today Microsoft released a refresh for the Windows Phone Mango Beta, which brought it up to 7712, from 7661. With Mango being released to manufacturers yesterday, and of course Fujitsu showing of their first Windows Phone, expectations were high, and a little rumour flew around fed by Cliff Simpkins of Microsoft, that a new build of the SDK and the Updated beta would be available to developers, but little did people think it would be today. SO features like Twitter and Linked in integration have come to the phone, and they are pretty inclusive, all your social networking accounts are integrated into, of course the people hub, the pictures hub. There’s a lot more filtering in the settings for the people hub as well, you can choose contacts from all or none of your accounts, and you can set it to see posts from only people in your filtered contact list. The maps app doesn’t seem to have change that much, it is still a tap on the screen to get the directions read out. All in all it seems pretty smooth at the moment, and I’m not having any reboots/crashes. With the final build to be deemed numerically 7720, this is as close as you can get before the final release. Noticeably, IE9 seems to be much more responsive, and I don’t usually have great signal when I’m home like this, so another bonus. I’ve only had a couple of hours to play with it, and there’s more I’ll find I’m sure. One thing that’s a little disappointing at the moment is for all of the talk of multitasking in Mango, the fact is that there are no apps that seem to support running in the background at the moment.
Last month, we released Beta 2 of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1. Yesterday, Windows Phone Engineering CVPTerry Myerson announced Windows Phone OS RTM. Today, I’m excited to announce that we are offering a refresh of the beta tools to our registered developer community.
Starting this morning, you can download the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 “Beta 2 Refresh” from the ‘Mango’ Connect site. We’ve received positive feedback on the Mango tools and bits we’ve shared, but appreciate that many devs are still interested in working with a more complete build. Today’s refresh of the tools represent a month of great progress by the engineering team, further refining and improving the Mango developer experience.
…but wait! There’s more…
If that isn’t exciting enough, we’ve also pushed an OS update to the Microsoft Update servers this morning, allowing you to refresh retail Windows Phones that devs updated to Mango over the last month. If you previously updated, you can expect the following notice on your phone over the next few days:
Via WindowsDevBlog
