I am sure that many of you are up to date with the new features of Mango and I hope that some of you even followed the liveblog, despite me not having access to the internet. Anyway, I thought I’d share with you the pictures I have taken today and outline the new features of Mango.

The stage was set…

Achim Berg, Corporate Vice President welcomed us to the event and kicked it off.

Berg outlined how the aim of Mango is to be “smarter and easier” and it focuses on three key areas, Communications. Apps and the Web. This structure was used to announce the new features of Windows Phone.

All of the announcements were later demoed by Nick Hedderman and I have added the images of the demos alongside the announcements by Berg.

Communications

Firstly, Berg pointed out how using a phone is not just about using a phone but now involved many, many different services which, in turn, can work across more than one device type.

The first announcement was “groups” to allow users to group contacts into meaningful collections and communicate to all those people quickly and efficiently.

the groups page shows Live Tiles of the people within it, showing their status and also any new communications the user has from them.

It is possible to swipe to the next pivot section within the group to see what’s new with all the members of the group and also new pictures from the group.

The group page acts like a single user’s page with the various ways to content the members of the group towards the bottom of the page.

The user can select with which method they wish to contact the members of the group.

Then to deal with all the services available to people to communicate with one another Microsoft are introducing a new feature called “threading” that allows people to have a single list of their communications with a single person across a variety of communication services and technologies.

Threads allow all communications with a person appear in a single conversation. You can see below how texts and Facebook messages were interchanged with no impact on the conversation. The users can select with which service to send the message or, I believe, the phone can offer the best option (if both people are online then it will use IM).

Messenger is being used below, instead of texting or Facebook messages. It’s possible to change one’s Messenger presence on the phone as shown below.

Next it was on to emails as a way to keep in contact with people. Showing how Mango will support conversation view showing both the emails of those involved in the conversation and the user’s emails.

In addition to the new features in emails, the calendar was also shown off that now supports multiple calendars including syncing with a user’s Facebook calendar.

And whilst on the topic of Facebook Mango will make it very easy to tag people in photos.

Apps

Berg then went on to talk about the Apps on Windows Phone and what Microsoft plan to do to make apps better on the platform.

The biggest thing for apps is that multitasking is coming to Windows Phone to allow users to seamlessly move in and out of apps and games.

Not much to show for multitasking other than the below shot.

The second announcement for apps was making the apps “smarter” and offering more features for the Live Tiles. Some of these announcements had been made at MIX only a few weeks ago.

We were shown a new app from British Airways, that may or may not be released, that makes use of some new features within Mango. The app made use of alarms, combined XNA with Silverlight and allowed parts of the app to be pinned to the start screen.

Then we had a look at some of the changes coming to the Office hub with its colour coordinated tiles for the different file types and that it now lists PDFs.

The Office hub will also integrate with more services now including (thankfully!) SkyDrive.

Lastly for apps we were shown the completely overhauled Xbox hub with emphasis being made on the Spotlight feature, the avatar (including the animations, such as a chicken running around) and other people’s profiles.

Web

The last of the main three categories was the web and Berg talked about how some mobile OSes try to emulate the full web, with its blue links.

However a mobile device can offer much more for users because of its additional sensors etc. and with Mango users will get the full web thanks to IE9.

In addition to Internet Explorer 9 coming to Windows Phone some other Web focused additions will be “quick cards” and “local scout”, both are aggregation features

To show off the power of Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Phone it was compared to the iPhone 4. This was the same test as shown off at MIX with the same results, Windows Phones, with Mango, are much faster on the web than the iPhone.

Following this demo we were shown Bing’s new images pane (sadly I didn’t get a picture) and Local Scout. Local Scout will allow users to be informed about the place they are in to help them explore.

After we had been shown everything that had been demoed Hedderman had one last treat for us. His “girlfriend” sent him a text, his phone then asked if he wanted it read out, he said he did and with that the phone read the text out. He was then given the option to reply to the text and dictated a message and sent it. It was possible for Hedderman to receive a text, to it to be read aloud and for him to reply al without touching his phone.

The Berg retook the stage and spoke to us what we had seen and told us that there are over 500 new features in Mango

To finish off he wanted to speak to us about the Windows Phone ecosystem and how he saw it split into 4 separate areas.

For “developers” he was pleased to announce that there are now over 18000 apps in the market and that Windows Phone should soon have more apps than RIM.

For “services” he showed us some of the services that are being integrated into Windows Phone.

For “operators” we were shown the countries that currently offer Windows Phone and then the additional countries that will offer Windows Phone when Mango is released.

For “handset manufactures” we were shown a slide of the companies that make Windows Phones.

And with that the event was finished. Just one thing to note, in the video that was shown at the very beginning a new logo was use for Windows Phone, this logo appeared a few things at the event ;).

I will have more to share with you tomorrow about today’s event and Mango so make sure you check those posts out too.