Besides App Connect, Bing is home to some of Mango's most interesting new features. The Windows Phone 7. When you have location awareness turned on in the Bing settings, Local Scout channels Yelp and other restaurant and business databases to serve up dining, events, and retail stores in your immediate area. Tap the sliver of a map up top to expand it and plot your course.

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The map hooks into reviews, events, and details of the establishment. Scout is a fine idea that seemed to suffer some hiccups during our tests. It was slow to load at times, and although we later discovered filters for ratings and distance, the feature was hidden and unintuitive. We'd also like to see expanded management options that let you fine-tune your location and take you beyond the 20 listed results before marking this feature fully useful.

Bing Vision, on the other hand, is a visual search app that mashes up traditional bar code readers with image-identification software. Without pressing a single other button, Bing Vision will return search results that you can drill into. Barcodes need not be aligned for a successful scan, and the tool remembers past searches. Bing Vision will also slightly less successfully scan text that you can opt to translate into a number of languages. Bar code scanning will work for U. Bing Vision needs some work done for it to live up to its considerable promise--it would be a killer feature tied into certain shopping apps.

Search success was hit or miss. The database didn't match to a new hardback that's being aggressively promoted in book stores, though it did register the bar code and it did identify some other books, a bottle of hand lotion, and the barcode off a soda can. Although we were told in May that magazines and posters were included in the recognition database, we never had luck getting Bing to recognize Wired, Scientific American, or Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Translation worked well enough, but the software rarely captured the entire text. We'd also like the option of setting a default translation language for longer-term translation requests. Bing's final addition, the new music identification feature, is simple and plain, but handy. Like Shazam and other music ID apps, if you launch it while next to a source of recorded music, Bing will attempt to identify the song title and cover art, giving you the option to open the record in the Zune Marketplace app.

We experienced some problems in this camp, too.

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An incoming meeting notification killed the listening feature, and the app didn't recognize everything we threw its way. At times, it didn't offer a record for every identified song. Microsoft tinkered with the interface, like moving the address bar to the bottom of the screen and hiding icons to increase the content real estate. GPU-powered hardware acceleration now renders content faster and more efficiently, Microsoft says. Indeed, the Samsung Focus with Mango loaded graphically rich pages significantly faster than the original Samsung Focus we placed right beside it in simultaneous tests on the same Wi-Fi network.

IE's ability to share articles and such with social networks like Twitter and Facebook is another welcome feature; before you could share via e-mail or texting. We were able to post messages to Facebook this way; they took just a minute to appear. Protected browsing mode and new "hang" protection were two other features Microsoft has added behind the scenes, but we were unable to test them.

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A new feature called Smart DJ works like Pandora and others to create a playlist from your collection based on the artist, song, or album you're currently playing. Zune Pass subscribers get another boost, since Smart DJ will also include Marketplace songs that when creating a playlist. You can even save playlists and share them with friends via e-mail.

We can't say we always agreed with the artist or song groupings, but we applaud Microsoft for SmartDJ in general. Voice commands were always part of Windows Phone 7, but Mango lets you compose a text message and instant message with just your voice. It's an excellent resource in theory, but in practice, accuracy is only so-so, punctuation and capitalization are absent, and formatting was often bizarre, with spaces between a word and a contraction.

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The voice-to-text software will work in a pinch for hands-free texting, but it isn't the most satisfying implementation, mostly because humans trump computers every time. Press and hold the Home button to get started. Reading out incoming messages is also new.

In the Settings, you can choose how and when you want them read--through Bluetooth, wired headsets, or both. Combined with voice dictation, Mango can make your phone a truly hands-free communications device. Many other mobile phones are capable of one or both of these with various apps; we're also glad to see it here. Multitasking This feature's a misnomer in truth; calling it "task-switching" is more accurate. Like the other mobile platforms, Windows Phone 7 already runs multiple system programs simultaneously. It wasn't until Mango, however, that you could seamlessly switch among open apps.

Just press and hold on the Back arrow button beneath the screen and watch the program shrink to a thumbnail size, then swipe left and right to see open programs. Mango will keep your place so you won't have to reload every time you leave and return to the app. Exciting in that it represented a new paradigm for Windows where the phone and the desktop OS were moving much closer together. This unification came at a terrible cost however.

As we mentioned earlier, the Windows Phone 7 series was discontinued with no upgrade path to Windows Phone 8. Especially affected were people who bought the then just released Nokia Lumia , it was had excellent hardware but was saddled with crippled software. Microsoft attributed this stare of events to kernel changes and hardware incompatibility in an attempt to deflect criticism.

The spectre of this decision still haunts the company today with constant reassurance being needed for each progressive software update. Windows Phone 8 advanced the Windows Phone platform in several ways. X devices were capped at 16 GB. Each device boasting up to date hardware specs and unique designs. It eliminated the gutters on the start screen, allowing the tiles to cover up all the visible space. There was also more customization added here, while Windows Phone 7 had allowed you to move your tiles around and change their colour to a limited palette, 8 allowed you to resize your app tiles, whether built-in or third-party.

There were three sizes which provided a different experience with the smallest tile size offering merely an icon view, the medium tile showing moderate information and the wide tile being especially useful for live information previews for apps like IM and weather apps. Microsoft also added a few more accent colours bringing up the total number of available colours to 20 and an optional one which could be configured by an OEM or Carrier Verizon red and Nokia blue for example.

The UI also underwent a subtle redesign with all tiles and icons becoming flat and angular, best viewed in the Office App and OneDrive tiles. Microsoft expanded the Xbox integration from the games hub to all entertainment related hubs on the phone, this included the Music and Videos hub. However, not all functionality here was carried over with syncing being degraded and the ability to rent or buy videos being stripped completely.

In addition to all these woes, the hub lagged noticeably on low end hardware until GDR 3. The Zune desktop tool was rendered useless for WP8 devices with a new sync told being released. Unfortunately, as with all things related to the Zune transition, the new software client was clunky and inefficient with the much lambasted Zune suddenly becoming loved by fans after its demise. The Games hub received a redesign, a new green and gray colour scheme to match the new music hub.

Beyond that, its functionality remained mostly intact. In practice, you could make use of this as a handy guest feature for handing out your phone to others to use for whatever reason. The second feature was the rooms feature, if you had several members of your family using Windows Phone, you could add them to your family room and share calendars, notes as well as group chat.

Unfortunately, the relative unpopularity of Windows Phone hamstrung this feature for most users. The Wallet app stored your payment details like Paypal and debit and credit cards, it also allowed users to store cards like club cards and membership cards. The implementation of this feature was left to the carriers who for the most part neglected it.

Effectively rendering it useless. Other than that, the Wallet was a pretty good passbook replacement, with third-party apps even offering ways to convert Passbook.

1. UC Browser

Windows Phone 8 introduced Internet Explorer 10 to the platform. Windows Phone did not support webkit, this made several websites render poorly in the browser as well as locked Windows Phone users out of any future Kik messenger updates. Tabbed browsing was a chore for most with only six tabs being supported. HTML5 video was not supported either with the OS having to download and play videos using the inbuilt video functionality, this resulted in an embarrassing fiasco between Microsoft and Google about a YouTube app eventually.

Options like flash that were previously hidden in the overflow menu were dragged out and now placed front and centre. The largest update was the addition of a lenses feature which allowed apps with camera features to register themselves as such and be launched from the camera app. The other miscellaneous improvements include visual tweaks to the Office hub. OneNote was broken out of the hub to become its own app and OneDrive received further integration with the OS.