[Windows Phone 7 General] c0wb0ycliche:
So I am going to try to avoid talking at length about things already mentioned in press reviews unless its super relevant, I really just want to focus on my experience using the Mango beta.

Good things.

It’s freaking fast. Generally moving around the OS is noticeably quicker, not only due the actual speed of transitions, but also I think things have been rearranged so you are able to do what you need to more efficiently. Things are just organized better, e.g. search in the apps list.

Visual voicemail is simple and works (after a quick call to my carrier to turn it on from their end.) It looks like the screen where you choose ringtones with the play button on the left.

The improvements to the People hub are awesome. Groups works great, although I’d like to be able to have more than 20 people per group, and I’d like to be able to rearrange the order they are in. But otherwise, it’s really great. A contacts tile now shows when you have a new message/voicemail/email from them.

The improvements to messaging are also great. Messages you send are now a shade darker or lighter than messages from someone. After attempting to enable Facebook chat a dozen times it finally worked (something I’m assuming will be fixed by release) and chatting works well, switching chat mediums on the fly works better in actual practice than watching someone else do it. Since I don’t really have Windows Live contacts I’m not sure if that part of chat is working.

My one critique is that (like the people hub) I don’t understand why they don’t open the messaging hub to more 3rd party applications. If something like IM+ can connect to all these different chat services, why not allow the OS to? Also, why can’t we still send video?

E-mail works exactly as promised. Linked inboxes and threaded conversations.

Generally the UI has been made more consistent. Marketplace searches now yield a pivot menu to switch between music and apps and podcasts. The phone buttons are larger and more metro-y. The music controls are always in the same place whether in the music player, lock screen, or volume drop down (which itself now has been updated, shows volume as 20/30 instead of little bars.) You can have artist art fade in on the lock screen while listening to music which is pretty cool too.

Bad things/things needing improvement.

When you press the search button, now it ALWAYS brings up Bing and there’s a delay. This is how it should have been from day one, but since it isn’t, I’m still getting used to the fact that I can’t use it to search marketplace or email or any other place where previously the search button took you to an in app search. Also, whenever you do press the search hard button the phone temporarily freezes for a millisecond and music playing skips. Weird but noticeable if you listen to music a lot – but almost certainly a beta issue.

Multi-tasking. It isn’t multitasking. It’s the same as Windows Phone has always been since day one – you can back through previously opened apps. The difference is now you can see more than one at a time. This wouldn’t be so bad if they fixed the transitions, but as of now, it’s honestly pretty bad. You hold back (for a very short amount of time, I did it by accident a lot) and it zooms out (even if nothing else is in the “list” so to speak, I would prefer it does nothing and stays on start screen in this scenario) and you see the “open” (or “dehydrated”) apps, and can pan over to them to click into them. But once you do, they almost 100% of the time go to a different screen than the one you saw in the preview, and after loading look more like the preview. If the preview image matched what you saw when you clicked into the app, this would be an almost flawless illusion of multitasking, but as of now it’s just kind of messy.

Even with the start screen- animated live tiles are not in the same position in the preview as when you click the app, so it becomes visibly obvious that you aren’t actually seeing a live preview. I am really hoping that this is a beta issue, because the idea is good, just the execution is messy. In regard to background apps or audio, I haven’t been able to test this as I can’t find any apps that support it yet.

Internet Explorer 9 Mobile. This has probably been my biggest disappointment. While it most certainly is faster/better than IE now on Windows Phone, the HTML 5 execution doesn’t seem anywhere near as impressive as Microsoft makes it seem. If you go to the MS HTML 5 mobile demos (like the fish and speed reader) they work great… but go to an HTML 5 site, and it barely works, or works really really slowly (like Flash on Android.) Even simple things, like Dragon Age Legends HTML5 mobile version, don’t work at all in some cases. If HTML5 is the industry answer to “why no Flash?” it needs to work better. Every single HTML 5 site I went to either didn’t work, or worked poorly. Not acceptable. Again, I’m hoping this is a beta issue only, and that it’s resolved by release.

Bing navigation. It’s serviceable but just barely. The fact that the map updates, but not the directions, is bizarre. So if you are driving to a destination, the map rotates and moves along with you, but to actually hear what you need to do next, you need to tap the direction. Again, hoping this is a very early version.

Connection to hidden Wifi doesn’t seem to be possible even though the WP devs said it was. And I guess you can use custom ringtones but through a workaround using the Zune software. Also, Wifi sync doesn’t work

So, generally, the Mango beta shows some promise, but still needs a lot of work. I’ll be using it on my main phone for at least a few weeks, then I’ll decide if I want to go back for the time being. For the record, I have an App Hub account and am running Mango legitimately on a developer unlocked T-Mobile USA HD7 which I hard reset after the update. I’ve had a few apps that won’t start, or crash a lot since updating.