Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Windows Phone 7 Mango: Bing, Directions & SMS

For those out their waiting for Windows Phone 7′s “Mango” release, you could be in for a treat when it arrives, as there are reports that in the near future Microsoft will be adding a few new features to Bing, which could prove very useful to the user.

It has been rumoured that there will be a new function known as Bing Audio that will able to recognise music (just like Shazam) and sell Zune tracks. Another feature revealed is Bing Vision, which will be able to use the smartphones camera to do optical character recognition and possibly provide support for augmented reality apps, and read barcodes.

Information on the features comes from a Windows Phone Dev Podcast, which featured Microsoft’s Brandon Watson and come to us from WMPoweruser via Engadget, it has also been indicated that Bing Maps could come with turn-by-turn voice directions.

Other features rumoured to be added by Microsoft to Bing are voice-to-text SMS messages, so there will be no need for messages to be typed and a native podcast player. What do you think of Bing possibly coming with these new features? Are there any other features that you would like to see? Please let us know.