The date for the then

The date for the then and there major update to Windows Phone is no more precise than "this autumn", and in spite of Joe Belfiore's apology about the slow rollout of NoDo, mobile operators are on the whole going to have to take time to test Mango.

The endless scrolling app list

Instead of the endless scrolling app list, Mango breaks up the list of your apps by letter; tap one letter to get an on-screen alphabet that Joe Belfiore calls a jump list, so you can choose the first letter of the app you want or get the full keyboard to type a search.

TRY THIS: When you search for an app on your phone, if it's not there you can look on Marketplace - and all the apps there link to similar apps to try instead

Optional gyroscope

New phones will have an optional gyroscope and a feature developed by Microsoft Technology combines that with the compass to create a 3D motion sensor to make it much easier to write apps that understand how you're moving the phone; a prototype Augmented Reality app from Layar overlays tweets on video of the people around you as you pan the phone around the room, nevertheless it doesn't jitter up and down if your hand shakes a little.

The new browser is particularly impressive. IE9 on Windows Phone has the core IE9 engine from the PC and it gets a version of the Chakra JavaScript engine and the same hardware acceleration for video, text rendering and canvas drawing, which should improve web speeds as then as displaying full web pages. There's no news on a Flash plug-in; instead Microsoft is pushing the HTML5 audio and video features.

Even although Skype and Kik messenger customers are launching shortly, running VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and chat apps in the background will all in all be a problem for Mango because they can't keep the network connection when they're not the foreground app.

The foreground app can carry on running when the phone is locked if it's set up to do that, however apps will no longer carry on running when there's a chooser or launcher on screen. That's something developers figured out how to do that the Windows Phone team had never intended to work, so as a matter of fact it's more fixing a bug than removing a feature.

Overall, Mango looks to be a good balance of letting developers do more with apps and staying true to the Windows Phone philosophy that no app should ever be able to do something so problematic that you regret installing it.

1. This is all in all a list of mainly derived features that just shows Microsoft In spite of everything hasn't caught up with iOS or Android. The new OS looks interesting on first glance, however it seems more of a gimmick than a actually innovative OS.