Mango

This morning I installed the leaked RTM build of Mango on my Omnia 7 and played around with it for some time. Verdict: solid, scarcely outstanding, and a tad disappointing in places.

What Mango essentially accomplishes is to retrofit most of the features that were reported missing when Windows Phone 7 came to market in 2010. Mango now sports multitasking, a unified inbox, threaded mail view, turn-by-turn navigation, permanent changes of camera settings, IE9 with a functional landscape mode, Bing voice search, improved Office, and many more enhancements, most of which center around social network integration.

Alas, it fails to address many of the minor shortcomings I described in this blog. Let me name a few examples. Mango still does not feature speed dialing, it lacks folders or groups virtually everywhere except the Me hub, the keyboard keeps disregarding special characters like umlauts, the browser still takes no notice of Flash, and the mobile nomads will continue to miss native thethering.

Mango thus leaves me puzzled. Windows Phone surprisingly turns up a lot like Apple's iOS when it comes to maturity. You will easily spot feature omissions in Windows Phone, some minor, some glaring, but the features it does offer are implemented with such care, thoughtfulness and virtuosity that you would hardly believe it to be just the second iteration. After handling a Windows Phone powered device for even a short while, you will clearly see the territory where it shines and outshines its competitors. However, Microsofts's fledgling mobile OS leaves a good lot to be desired. Android feels more powerful, more versatile, more customizable than Windows Phone.

Windows Phone is quality, Android is quantity. And Android offers such an abundance of the latter that it comes out on top. For me. For now.