Microsoft shows off new Windows Phone 7 features

Microsoft showed off the next version of its Windows Phone 7 software, code named Mango, that includes 500 new features, including smoother integration with social networking programs, built-in voice-to-text and text-to-voice support for hands-free use and the ability to run one application while another is working in the background.

"We set out to make the smartphone smarter and easier," Andy Lees, president of the Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft, said at the end of a news conference in New York City this morning.

Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Phone 7

(Credit: Microsoft)

The software giant said Mango will be available this fall.

The challenge for Microsoft will be living up to the hype created prior to the announcement. Holding an event in New York and encouraging media attendance comes with expectations. And it stumbled early, with the video feed of the press conference bogging down and not loading for many Web watchers, greeting them instead with a screen with a bar slowly loading the video feed.

The company announced plenty of new features, including a version of Internet Explorer 9 for the phone. It introduced a program called Local Scout that offers hyper-local search results, based on a users location, and recommends nearby restaurants, shopping and activities. And it's created a new feature called Quick Cards, which provides a brief summary of relevant information and related apps when users search for a product, movie or event.

Windows Phone has had a rough start. Launched in 2010, the mobile phone software has yet to make any sort of dent in the leads held over it by Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Just last week, market research firm Gartner found that of the 100 million smartphones sold worldwide in the first quarter, only 1.6 million of them ran Windows Phone 7. Android, which had just 9.6 percent of the market a year earlier, soared to 36 percent of the market, while Apple held 16.8 percent share.

Mango press conference video feed delay

(Credit: Jay Greene/CNET)

No doubt that some of that has to do with the botched efforts to update the Windows Phone 7 software. When Microsoft send out software to prepare phones for updating in February, some devices failed. Microsoft pulled the update to fix some bugs. But even the follow-up update crashed devices. Microsoft corporate vice president Joe Belfiore later apologized for the problems, citing a "lack of preparation."

Even little hiccups hurt. At MIX11, Microsoft announced that the popular game Angry Birds would come to the Windows Phone marketplace on May 25. But last week, news broke that the game would now ship on June 29.

Microsoft is hoping new devices will help right the ship. In February, the company announced a broad partnership with the world's top mobile handset maker, Nokia, to run Windows Phone 7 software on its devices. The first of those devices could roll out before the end of the year.

And at the New York press conference, Microsoft announced three new phone partners - Acer, Fujitsu and ZTE.

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