Lg Fantasy Wp7 Leaked

According to WpCentral, Lg's fall 2011 roadmap of phones has been leaked, and down the roadmap,likely in the fourth quarter according to pocketnow.comthere will be a new wp7 handset known as the Lg Fantasy that is likely to be a Mango device. Check out the pic below, courtesy of pocketnow.com

Archos 35 Home Connect Revealed By FCC

The Archos 35 Home Connect was launched with the Archos G9 Series in June, and was portrayed as a web radio running android, well thanks to the fcc filingwe now know that it will run 2.2 froyo, and we also have a users manual to look at.

Source:ArcTablet

New Wp7 Devices

So today a few new wp7 handsets were shown off by a microsoft employee, manufactured by acer, fujitsu, zte, and a nice thin new samsung model that will be coming out, watch the video below.


Hopefully these phones will be out by Christmas as Steve Ballmer said earlier this week.

Mango Mania Part 5-Browsing For Mangoes

IE9 Portait Browser

In this second to last installment of Mango Mania, I'll be discussing the new internet explorer 9 browser. So here we go!

The new browser has had quite a few changes, some useful, others taking away from the usefulness in my experience. First of all, the new browser is pretty fast, web pages load up immediately. The look of the browser has under gone some changes too. In portrait mode, gone are the add to favorites, favorites, and tabs buttons, for better or for worse, as it does give you a nice amount of screen real estate, but now to access your other tabs, you have to tap the familiar elipses, which brings up a slew of options, such as:


Tabs-View your other open tabs.

Recent-In the new IE9 browser you can revisit your closed pages.

Favorites-View your Favorite web pages.

Add to Favorites-Pretty self explanatory.

Share Page-Share the interesting article your reading to others via email, and text messaging.

Pin to Start-Pin a website you visit constantly to avoid typing it in everyday.

Settings-From here you can choose to "Allow cookies", "Get suggestions from Bing as you type", "allow internet explorer to collect my browsing history". You can also choose your website preference from desktop and mobile, and delete your history.

You also now have the address bar that you've wanted in land scape orientation, with the elipses to access those same options listed above.

IE9 Land Scape Browser

All in all the IE9 browser has seen a nice improvement, especially in speed, but  it seems like it's also lost some productivity, mainly by losing the tabs button. Just to view any open tabs you have running, you'll now have to make three taps, as opposed to the 2 in Nodo. You have to tap the elipses, tap the tabs section, then select which tab you'd like to run, although Im gonna miss being able to just tap the tabs icon, but this is also subject to change as this is a beta.

Mango Mania Part 4-Mango Market

Market Place Search

This latest installment is very short, but the next one will be longer, I'll be discussing the new market place additions, so lets jump right in.

First of all, the market place now has a much better search function, in NoDo, you had to press the search button, and risked your phone switching to the Bing search page, or if it did search for something, you would just get a giant list of music and apps without any kind of filter. In mango, you get a simple search icon as soon as you enter the market place, and now have different search filters, such as apps+games,music, and podcasts. This makes the whole search feature much more accurate and productive, along with a new suggestions as you type feature.

Podcast Search

Zune HD Firmware Update...

So today I noticed a few people on twitter talking about a zune hd firmware update, I immediately checked my local forum, and saw people talking about it on there to, then started thinking"OMG! New FW FTW!" all that good stuff, but unfortunately, according to a tweet posted by Dave Mclauchlan, the man who has a lot of dealings in working with zune, the update is simply a bug fix(Proof:http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2524375.mspx), although it is still nice to know that the HD did get one more FW update, its last being in april 2010.

Mango Mania Part 3-Mango Media

The Modified Now Playing Screen

I'll be discussing the redesign of the Zune(music+videos) hub is more productive what with the new features that have been added, such as making playlists on the go, the smart DJ playlists, and especially the OTA(over the air) downloading of podcasts.

Starting with the new now playing screen,
you now have the previous, pause/play, and next buttons at the top of the screen instead of the bottom, and instead of having to tap the album artwork to reveal the favorite, shuffle, and repeat options, they are now on the side of the album artwork. You also now have the option to show the artist your listening to on the lock screen, as seen below.

Artist On Lock Screen Feature

Another new addition to Mango is downloading podcasts on your device via WiFi or 3g. My phone doesn't have service, so there's no 3g, but I did download some podcasts over WiFi, and had no problems with it. After selecting the podcast to download, you can then choose if you want to subscribe to it, and from there can choose how many episodes you want to download, along with a helpful only download over WiFi option, so as not to use your data plan up.

The Added playlist functionality is also useful for those of you who like to make playlists on the go. What ever tracks your listening to, all you have to do is tap the elipses in the now playing screen and select 'Save as playlist'. Easy and quick, and the Smart Dj mix is even easier. All you do is hold down on one artist you like, and a drop down menu appears with the options 'add to now playing', 'play smart dj mix', and 'pin to start'. All you do is tap play smart dj mix, and the phone does the rest for you, although it did give me a message on lesser known artists. For one it said, 'we cant create a smart dj mix for you because we're not sure who this is.' but for the most part this feature worked just fine.

All in all the redesign and added features have pretty much satisfied me in the area of Media on Mango.