Andy Lees: Windows Phone ‘Mango’ Press Conference

Remarks by Andrew Lees, President, Mobile Communications Business
New York
May 24, 2011

ANDY LEES: Seven months ago, we launched Windows Phone 7 into a crowded smartphone market. And we did so with a new perspective. You see, phones were just becoming application launchers where consumers were faced with a grid of icons, and a sea of applications.

We set about on a new mission to redefine smartphones to make it smarter, and easier so that people could do more and have more fun. And we delivered this through a two-part strategy. The first one was to put the consumer at the center, and not the operating system by delivering a set of complete experiences for what people want to do most on their phones, with a delightful interface that required fewer steps, and that was designed to be easier to use. We wanted to provide the customer with less clutter and more clarity.

The second part of the strategy was a new approach to the ecosystem across handset makers, developers and mobile operators. We strived to optimize how hardware, software and services work together.

For example, when using the touch on the device, making sure the hardware and the software works well so that you can type as quickly and easily as possible; making sure that we provided developers with a rich platform, and yet balances performance and battery life; that we had efficient data sync to the way in which you provide information across the network to cloud services. In short, we wanted to provide innovation and choice, but without the fragmentation and frustration.

So, here we are today, seven months after the Windows Phone 7 launch, unveiling the next chapter with a major release of Windows Phone code-named “Mango.” It builds upon our mission to make the smartphone smarter, and easier. And for this release we found that customers want three main things from their smartphone. The first one is to be able to connect and share with family, friends and colleagues; the second area is rich applications so that you can do more everywhere that you go; and, thirdly, to be able to harness the power of the Internet from the palm of your hand. So, this then lays out the focus for the “Mango” release, smarter and easier for communications, applications and the Internet.

So, let’s take a look at the first one of those, communications. Well, of course, the phone was originally designed to do communications. It was all about making phone calls. But today, people communicate in lots of rich ways, text messaging, picture messaging, IM, chat, e-mail, social networking, even checking in your location is communicating to others about where you are. Taking pictures has moved from being about capturing memories in order to be able to share, tag, and to be able to get comments and be the beginning of a laugh out loud. And people are communicating, not just phone to phone, but phone to PC, and even to TV. But the problem is that today smartphones only include the very basic communications.

Everything else is an app. And you need different apps for different ways to communicate. This means that people need to be able to hunt and peck to be able to communicate and share, and they keep missing the moment. With Windows Phone “Mango,” we have a people-centric approach to communications. We bring together all the ways in which you connect and share across all the services that you and your friends use on different screens. So, let’s take a look at how it works, and I would like to introduce Derek Schneider, who is going to take us through a demo of how we make it smarter and easier for communications with Windows Phone “Mango.”

Derek.

DEREK SNYDER: Thanks, Andy.

Good morning. So, as Andy talked about, one of the big focuses for us in “Mango” was communications. I’m going to hook up my phone here, which is running a prerelease version of “Mango.” The way in which (video/audio feed interruption) communications is very different because it’s people-centric. We wanted to set people at the center of our focus. And one of the ways we do that, of course, is by bringing information forward. So, we’ve improved the home screen experience inside of “Mango” so that we’re bringing more information to Live Tiles. When you have new call history, when you have messages, when you have IMs, which we’ll talk about, even when you have stuff going on in your social networks. You’ll notice that notifications are being pushed into these smarter Live Tiles.

Now, if you’re going to have a people-centric approach, you want to start that, of course, in the People Hub. And for that, we bring together all of the services that you’re already using. With Windows Phone 7 we have Windows Live and Facebook connecting up to your work email using Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! With “Mango,” we’ve added Twitter and LinkedIn as well. And so, now all of those services are integrated together so that I can see what’s new with all of my friends across all those different places without having to go to separate applications.

I can scroll over to my recent contacts and see what’s going on, for instance, with my friend Christina. She’s actually moving to the city this weekend, so I wanted to keep in touch and see what’s going on. Just like in 7, we bring together all of her social networks, all the ways that I know her, and we show things like her latest status message right from the Contact Card. I can see what’s new across all those different social networks, just like in 7, but with “Mango” we’ve improved the amount of context that we’re bringing together for a person by adding, for instance, pictures. So, right here in one view you can actually see all the pictures that Christina has been posting, all the places she’s been tagged across a variety of those social networks, and they’re all available in one view.

And one of my personal favorite things is having call history sorted by person. And it may appear to be just call history, but it’s actually a rich communication history as well, where I have e-mails, I have picture messages, text messages, IMs, which we’ll talk about in a moment, and also visual voice mails, which are now available as part of the “Mango” release as well. So, that’s all brought together in one place, and I can see it very easily right from the card.

OK. So, that’s what we’re doing with specific people. But what happens with people and relationships that you have that are more than just one person? For that we have a new feature in “Mango” called groups. Groups help you mirror your real life relationships on your phone. And I’ve gone ahead and set up groups for my family, for some friends in New York City, some best friends that I have in Seattle. You can set up as many groups as you like.

If I go into the New York City group, you’ll actually notice that I’ve brought together all of my contacts that I care about here in New York City. They have Live Tiles that actually light up when I have new communication, like a new email that’s just come in from Melissa. So, it’s very easy for me to cut through all the clutter and see what’s going on with just those specific people that matter most to me.

I can see a filter of my social networks just for this group of people, which is extremely handy for cutting through all the Farmville Facebook noise that happens a lot, and I can also see all the pictures that were tagged in together. Since we’re always together, and we’re always hanging out, this is a cool way for us to just kind of see a photo album of all the ways that we’ve been hanging out, and all the experiences we’ve shared.

And as you may not expect, we actually do some group communication as part of this as well. Now, group communication we can do with e-mail, and we can also do with a bunch of new messaging and services experience we’re bringing to bear with “Mango.” We looked around at the industry, and we saw that our competitors were doing a couple of interesting things when it came to group communication. They were able to do group communication, but it was very proprietary. So, for instance, Blackberry Messenger, you have to have another Blackberry to participate in those group conversations. We wanted to plug into the services that you and your friends were already using. And for that we integrate the two largest social networking and chat services, Windows Live Messenger and Facebook Chat out of the box, both with excess of 500 million users. So, if I go ahead and start a conversation, you’ll notice it gives me status right away that everybody is, indeed, online. I can start a group conversation just like this.

Now, in Windows Phone 7 we were excellent in the way that we predicted and helped correct errors that you were making while typing. And in “Mango” we’ve taken this to the next level by actually predicting the words before you have a chance to make the mistakes at all. For instance, common phrases, like “happy birthday,” we understand that the most common word that comes after “happy” is “birthday,” and so we present that right on the screen. And so it’s a much faster, and much more intuitive typing experience that we’re bringing inside of the “Mango” release as well. So, that’s just a sample of what we’re doing inside the keyboard. There are actually a lot of enhancements we’ve made there as well.

Now, if I want to keep up with this group, just like all the other things I can do in Windows Phone, I can tag them, and actually pin them to the home screen, so that I can get updates flowing through, and we have tiles that give me notification from this group as well, calls, things like that, that all come into the home screen.

One of the other things we want to do, as I demonstrated a moment ago, is bring together all the different services that people were using. And we do this in a new feature called Threads. Threads is a way to weave together all the communication that you’re already using. For instance, I got this message from Andrew: This came in and it appeared to me as if it was a text message. I got a little toast. I went in and I got it right inside of my messaging app. Threads brings it together no matter what transport you’re using. So, you’ll notice here this Facebook conversation actually came to my phone. And it’s giving me intelligent information and telling me that Andrew is now offline, I should try text instead. And so, just like that, I can hit the switch button, and go ahead and switch to a text for mobile, and I can go ahead and continue the conversation on text. We keep it all in one place. It’s extremely easy to use.

One of the other things that we wanted to focus on is e-mail communication. We know that e-mail is really important to people and that getting the details right really matters. Our competitors have an all or nothing approach when it comes to bringing together all of your inboxes. Either they’re all together, or they’re all separate. You’ll notice that I’ve actually chosen to link two of my inboxes and have done that in a folder here called personal e-mail. So, I brought together my Hotmail, and my Gmail. I’ve also kept my work e-mail separate and we’ll take a look at that right now.

So, what I’ve got right here is a number of e-mails that have come in, just like you’d expect from Windows Phone, we have an excellent e-mail experience that we’ve only taken to the next level in “Mango.” You’ll notice that I’ve got a number of e-mails that are coming in here. Some people are reading them. They’re all real. They’re all real. And just like that I can see some conversations, actually, just like desktop Outlook, I can expand and contract. We think we have the best conversation view, because we, indeed, show not just what people were sending to you, but also what you’ve been sending to them. And you can forward that along. You can see attachments, and it expands and contracts in this very cool way.

One of the other things we wanted to do is make sure that enterprises were keeping their users really productive. And one of the ways that we do that is by adding those features that enterprises are looking for, for people to be productive on the go, one of which is information rights management. If I open this e-mail from Steve you’ll actually notice it says it’s a protected message, because he sent it with permissions. We can have permissions for all sorts of things on the desktop, do not print, do not forward. And this particular message has a do not forward tag attached to it.

So, the moral of the story for this is that I would not be able to open this message on any other phone, because they don’t support those types of rich information management tools the way that we do on Windows Phone “Mango.” And so now I can, of course, see this very important mail and take action.

One of the last things we do, and we started this with Windows Phone 7, was link together things that should be linked together. For instance, the e-mail experience and the calendar experience. When I opened this meeting request from Andy it automatically scans my calendar to see if I have scheduling conflicts.

When I tap on that it takes me to the part of my calendar that actually matters most to me right now, which is where that conflict exists. And you’ll notice we’ve got a variety of different colors here, because I’ve actually linked together my work calendar from Exchange, I’ve got my Gmail calendar in purple. I’ve got my green calendar, which is my family calendar on Windows Live. And we’ve actually expanded the number of things that we’re supporting by adding Facebook events into the calendar, as well. So, now if you open up this event you’ll be able to see all the details, you’ll be able to sign the wall, doing all these types of activities without an application.

Now, one of the last things we wanted to do is really focus on communication when your phone is out of reach. So, I’m going to do a very common scenario here, which is to start playing some music. Imagine for a moment that I’m in the car listening to some music, or I’m at the airport. So, I’ll start playing that right here. And as often may happen, your phone is out of reach, you have headphones on, or maybe a Bluetooth headset. And as often happens, a text message comes in.

PHONE VOICE: Message from A.J. Goss. You can say read it, or ignore.

DEREK SNYDER: Read it.

PHONE VOICE: Hey man, saw you were in New York City, free for dinner tonight?

You can say reply, call, or I’m done.

DEREK SNYDER: Reply.

PHONE VOICE: Say your message.

DEREK SNYDER: Yes, I am.

PHONE VOICE: Yes, I am. You can say send, or try again.

DEREK SNYDER: Send. And just like that it sends off, I haven’t had to touch the phone at all. I can do it completely hands-free, and we do cool things like interpret acronyms and abbreviations. For instance, NYC it actually read as New York City. We do the same thing with BTW and all the normal laugh out loud style phrases that you would use in chat.

So, what we have just seen is an overview of how we’ve taken connecting and sharing to the next level with “Mango,” back to you.

ANDY LEES: So, with Windows Phone “Mango” we put the people at the center, not applications. In fact, in the demonstration you’ve just seen we haven’t gotten into any applications at all. We allow you to communicate and share across all the ways you do that in a single experience. And we do that so that you can communicate phone to phone, or to PCs, and even TVs, and that we enable through supporting popular, not just proprietary services.

So, with Windows Live we support Hotmail, but we’ve enhanced that and now support messenger. With Facebook we’ve enhanced what we do with social networking, and pictures, but also added support for Facebook chat. With Exchange we’ve enhanced what we do, so that we make it by absolutely the best way in which you can do business related e-mail. And we have early support for new services like Twitter and LinkedIn.

With groups we allow you to keep up and communicate with the people who matter most. And the innovative capability of threads allows you to weave together the ways that you already communicate with text, picture messaging, IM, and chat. And finally, by providing people-centric pictures, where you go through and you go from a photo, to a conversation by automatically recognizing people and tagging them across the variety of networks that you support. So, with “Mango” the message always gets through.

The second area of focus is applications. We know that applications extend what you can do on a phone. And in April at our MIX conference, we showed the enhancements that we’re making to the platform and tools, including an innovative multitasking that balances performance, battery life, and network traffic. With this we enable new types of applications and games in Windows Phone “Mango.”

However, we wanted to go one step further with a smarter approach to applications. You see, in other smartphones applications are just silos. You’re presented with a grid of icons, and a sea of applications. There are two major problems with this. The first one is that those applications don’t integrate into the total phone experience. If you have a bunch of music apps, that’s just what you have, a bunch of apps. They aren’t integrated into a total music experience. So, the user has to go app by app, by app. That’s like going from the living room to the dining room and every time you have to go through the front door.

The second problem is that the information inside of those applications is locked up. You have to launch the application to see what’s going on and to be able to get access to it. So, with Windows Phone “Mango” applications are alive, as part of the total experience. To be able to deliver on this we have upgraded all of the hubs that are included in Windows Phone, and even upgraded the applications that we include with the phone, like Office with new versions of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, et cetera.

So, to show you how we take applications to the next level, let’s have Derek show us another demo.

DEREK SNYDER: Great. Thanks, Andy.

So, as Andy just talked about, we’ve taken applications to the next level in “Mango,” and one of the ways that we’ve done that, first and foremost, is by enhancing the hubs that we’ve already included with the phone. The three that I’ll show you today are pictures, Office and Xbox. As you saw in the previous slide, we wanted to make pictures a people-centric experience. And the way that we’ve done that is by actually incorporating all the new ways that you use photos to actually connect and share, which is use them, tag them, and start the conversation.

So, if I open up this photo of my friend Christina here, you’ll notice that when I upload to Facebook, which is just built right into the core experience, we do something really interesting, which is scan the photo and find the faces. We have automatic face detection. So, you can tag this photo once, share it with all your different social networks and have that just work right out of the box.

One of the other things we wanted to do is enhance the Office experience on the phone, and for that we’ll go into the Office hub. So, I can see all of my documents here, I can see all of my notes. We’ve actually improved and enhanced the amount of places that we connect up and share, while other phones just do a lot of viewing and maybe some light editing of documents, we’re connecting up to SharePoint and Windows Phone 7, and now with “Mango,” Office 365, which is the subscription Office service for professionals and small businesses, and for consumers SkyDrive, where you get 25 gigabytes of free storage to connect, share, collaborate all of your documents online.

You’ll notice earlier in the mail from Steve he actually wanted some financial data. It turns out I do have it here. I stored it up on my SkyDrive. When I tap on this tile it will actually bring down the latest version of that from the server. So, if anybody has been making changes to that, it’s reflected right here. And just like you would expect from a true Office experience, we have all of the fidelity that you would expect on a Windows Phone. You have the ability to see the spreadsheet, make changes to it, and know that those changes aren’t going to be garbled up when you save those back, or send those to your friends.

You can also do interesting things like you would expect in Excel on the desktop, which is basically highlight a number of cells, and then do things like auto-sums, and find out that, in fact, there are math errors that I should correct before I share this out.

So, that’s just a sample of what we’ve done inside of Office. There’s actually a lot more that we’ve done beyond that.

One of the things we wanted to do now that I was gaining all this productivity back is go have some fun. And the way we do that is with the Xbox LIVE Hub, which has been completely redesigned for “Mango.” One of the things customers loved about Windows Phone 7 is that we have a very consistent approach to applications and games, where no matter what hardware you have there’s just a fantastic gaming experience. I’m going to load up “Rise of Glory,” which is a World War I flight sim. And regardless of which Windows Phone I have, the 3D acceleration is going to work just perfectly. I’m going to have an accelerometer, to be able to use motion controls. So, I as the consumer am never confused about whether this app will run.

So, I’m going to run this “Rise of Glory” game here. Get started. Start flying around. It just works perfectly, great. I’m going to get hit pretty soon here, so what will often happen is you’ll be in a game, you’ll be doing something, and then you get called away and you have to do something else. You want to send an e-mail, you want to have a text message, maybe answer a call, something like that. And the problem is people want to be able to get right back into the app very quickly. But, at the same time you want to be able to have all sorts of notifications and the ability  the voice still works.

One of the things you want to be able to do inside of that is have a fast app resume. So, I was in the game, and now I want to be able to get back to it really quick. And for that, we’ve brought really intelligent multitasking that instantly resumes the game, has you flying back around but doesn’t have any effects on battery life, or performance, because we basically hydrate and dehydrate the app, so that it can just instantly resume.

We wanted to take that a step further by giving consumers the ability to switch between multiple applications. If I press and hold the back button, for instance, I can scroll around and see the game that I was playing, go back to spreadsheets, and I can go spreadsheets, games, spreadsheet, games, which is often the flow that I have during the day. So, just like that you can easily move between them.

Let’s go back into the Office Hub. As I had said, this has been completely redesigned for Windows Phone “Mango.” We actually integrate the 3D avatar right here. And you always know it’s going to be a good day when you and your avatar dress exactly alike, and you’re just realizing it now, fantastic. He’s a sharp looking guy, good haircut. And just like that, you can have collectables for your avatar. I bought this guy a monkey, no judgments please, and you have all sorts of collectables, add-ons. You can buy shirts, all that stuff is just reflected right here, just as it is on the console today, and we have an avatar editor that you can use both on the phone, the console and the PC.

I can also take gaming to the next level by making it a social experience. This is the only phone that connects to Xbox LIVE, so at any given time I can see my friend requests that are coming in, I can see people that are online and what they’re playing. I can even compare games with certain friends and colleagues, like for instance, Andy, who you should learn that move. I can see all the recent games that are coming in here, and I can see all the recent games that are coming in here, and I can compare things. It’s funny, we were doing these demos that week and I think he was feeling the pressure, because his gamer scores have improved quite a bit since then.

But, you’ll see we’ve taken actually all of the games out of the box, and they now participate in this larger experience called the Xbox LIVE Hub. You don’t just have to go into those specific games to see scores, and see how you’re comparing with friends, and things like that, so making gaming a really social experience. So, that’s what we’ve done in our experiences, and that’s, again, just a taste. But, we also wanted to have a platform that developers could build incredible experiences on top of.

And to demonstrate that, I’ll show you an app that we’ve been working on with British Airways. Now, perhaps a lot of people in this room actually travel quite a bit, and you know that that can be a really inconvenient thing. And so having notifications, the ability to know when your flights are going to be late, whether they’re on time, having your boarding pass, all of that is becoming table stakes for a lot of travelers today.

The British wanted to build this into their application experience for “Mango” in a really new and innovative way. What you see here is actually a Live Tile that right off the bat is giving me some live status. And that’s a new thing that we’re doing in “Mango,” where you can have live notifications and Live Tile updates being pushed straight into the application based on location, time of day and other context that’s happening.

If I launch up the app, you’ll notice it’s designed with that same great Windows Phone look and feel where I have the pivot. It’s showing me my upcoming flight to London later tonight. I can see all of my settings. I can see my membership card, how many miles that I have, and all of my upcoming flights that are coming along.

Now, if I want to take a look at my flight that’s coming up tonight, I just tap into that flight. And I can get all my flight details. Now, what I may want to do is actually choose my seat, and British saw this as an opportunity to have a really compelling and interesting way for you to explore the airplane and decide what seat would be best for you.

What we’ve heard from developers in the past is, they didn’t want to make choices about using 3D graphics acceleration that would be possible if they were writing games in XNA, and what they could do with just making great applications in Silverlight.

And so in “Mango” you can mix those together where literally you have an application that has all the normal stuff apps would expect, but also incredible 3D gaming performance. In this case being used to take a virtual walk through the airplane, or indeed I can find out that that windows seat is probably better than the middle seat, and I can go ahead and choose that now, and confirm.

So, when I confirm that seat, 9F, great. I’m checked in. Good to go. I can get my boarding pass, I’m in the fast track here. And this, of course, can be scanned by the airport kiosk. But I can also go ahead and get some more information about the flight. I can get movies, and if I tap on any of these, these will take me to the Bing experience, where I can learn more, which we’ll talk about in a second. I can see all the food, the gourmet sandwich, roast beef sun dried tomato, it sounds good. And I can also see the captain’s name, so I can thank him, and I can see also the plane, and all the other information you would expect. And it’s all brought together.

Now, when I’m done getting all this information, I want to be able to get to this boarding pass quickly and easily. On other phones today, they have the capability to get the boarding pass, but the difficulty is you get popped back into the beginning of the app, you have to go find the boarding pass, and by this point you’re up at the desk. Here we have the boarding pass on a tile where you can tap, and using a new technology called App Shortcutting, get directly into the part of the app that you care about, in this case the boarding pass area.

So, you’ve seen how we’ve taken our applications and experiences to the next level with some enhancements to our core hubs, pictures, Xbox and Office, and also how we’ve taken the experience to the next level for developers so that they can write really compelling application experiences on top of “Mango.”

Back to you.

ANDY LEES: So, you’ve seen how we take applications to a new level with “Mango,” and how the enhancements that we provide in our platform, and tools, and intelligent multitasking enable smarter applications, and games to be delivered.

Finally, third-party applications have been freed from their silos. They become part of the total phone experience with Live Tiles, and application shortcuts so you don’t just launch applications, you go directly to the thing that you’re interested in right now.

We’ve enhanced the Office hub to make it easy for you to be able to author, edit and collaborate with colleagues across PCs and phones using new cloud services such as SkyDrive and Office 365.

We have a new Xbox LIVE Hub that uses avatars, and where you can go and compare scores, you can send messages to your friends about games, and challenge friends to multiplayer games across the phone, the PC and the console. Think of your applications as musical instruments. With “Mango,” they become an orchestra that finally has a conductor.

The last area of focus was the Internet. So far, the Internet on a phone has all been about getting the desktop browsing experience, and making that work on the phone. Well, we deliver that in “Mango” by including IE9. IE9 has been widely regarded as the leading desktop browser that shipped two months ago, and includes innovative capabilities like hardware acceleration of HTML5.

Well, the good news is that IE9 on “Mango” is not just similar to the phone browser  to the PC browser, it’s exactly the same. This means it’s great for consumers who want to have the same experience of different websites, and it’s also great for Web developers. However, we wanted to go one step further. We want to be able to tailor the Internet to the palm of your hand.

Today, people have to hunt using blue links in order to get things done with the Internet. With Windows Phone “Mango,” we deeply integrate Bing to make it easy to find, decide, and take action, and we use the full power and capabilities of the phone, including location, voice, typing, and  (video/audio feed interruption)  and rather than providing blue link answers, we actually bring the Internet to you in this innovative capability called Quick Cards, which we’ll show you in a moment. And, finally, we even blur the line between searching the Internet and finding applications.

So, with that, let’s bring Derek back, and he can show us how we take the Internet to the next level with “Mango.”

DEREK SNYDER: Thanks, Andy.

Now, to start this demo, I actually thought it would be interesting to do a comparison between us and a couple of other phones in the market today. And, as I’m getting those all turned on, from left to right, we actually have a Blackberry Torch running on AT&T, which is the latest and greatest Blackberry phone. We have an iPhone 4 running the latest firmware, just ran the update last night, and also have the brand new Samsung Droid Charge, which is the latest and greatest dual-core 4G LTE Android phone on Verizon. I think I got all the brands in. And then we also have Windows Phone running “Mango” right here as well.

Now, what I wanted to do is load what we call  (video/audio feed interruption)  live speed test. And basically what that does is show you all the ways that you could use HTML5 capabilities in terms of the way that renders the page, the hardware acceleration in which it renders, and basically spits back a frames count, and lets you know who finishes first. And it’s basically all about how fast you can load a page using the rendering engine.

And so, for that, I’m going to load up all the favorites on these screens so I can get as close to a simultaneous start as possible. I’m going to kind of work from left to right, so Blackberry will get a little bit of a head start.

So, HTML5 speed reading. Fantastic, let’s do it. All right. So, it looks like the Blackberry is running about four frames a second. The iPhone hasn’t quite started yet. Ten frames a second on the dual-core Android phone. And then we’re humming along at about 26-25 frames a second. And it looks like, indeed, “Mango” has just finished. The Android is coming along. iPhone hasn’t quite started yet. And Blackberry is on the edge here humming along at 4 frames as second.

And so what that really proves is that, yes, the Internet, browser, same browser as IE9, same browser on the phone, we’ve got that. And we’re going to have a fantastic browsing experience for people that want to be able to load pages, do graphics, and have an application-like experience with hardware acceleration inside of the phone.

We wanted to take that to the next level, and that’s really about how we participate and interact with Bing on the phone. Bing is not an app on Windows Phone. It’s, in fact, an integrated experience that just weaves itself throughout the entire phone experience.

You’ll notice we’ve actually upgraded Bing for Windows Phone “Mango,” and you’ll notice a bunch of different icons, it’s giving me some location information, and we’ll talk about some of those things right now.

But one of the things you want to do is make decisions, find answers. And so, if I want to see a movie later tonight, for instance I heard “Water for Elephants” is kind of good. I’m going to go ahead and type that in on the screen right now, and even within a few letters, it starts giving us suggestions based on what’s available on the Internet.

If I search for “Water for Elephants,” it actually uses my location and the time of day, and instead of giving me a bunch of blue links, instead gives me the movie times. And we do this in Windows Phone 7 today. Now, where we take this to a new level in “Mango” is with a new feature called Quick Cards. When I tap on the show times, it takes me to the Quick Card for this movie where it gives me the rating, the genre, the synopsis, all the things that I would actually want to know about the movie instead of taking me to a separate website.

I see all of the show times. Those are available for me right here. And we actually blur the lines between the Internet search that I’ve just started, and applications. And so, using a new feature called App Connect, we can hand off seamlessly and effortlessly between searches that you do on the phone, and the applications that are most suited to complete those searches.

So, IMDB I have on my phone. It turns out it’s really good for finding movie information, and it’s a very immersive application. That actually may be where I want to terminate my search. I want to start talking about “Water for Elephants,” and then it hands off, using app shortcuts, directly to the part of the app that I care about, which in this case is all the information about “Water for Elephants.” So, you see that we’ve blurred the line between applications and Internet search with “Mango.”

We take this a couple of steps further, though. If I go ahead and search for a restaurant, for instance, I hear the Minneta Tavern is good, despite my typo, it still finds it. We understand that this is a location, and so it starts us on the local tab instead of the Web search tab, for instance, and I can get a Quick Card for this restaurant where it has the photo of the front of the restaurant, it gives me hours of operation, categories. I can read all the reviews. So, we bring together all of the social information you would want for this as well. I can read all those ratings, and this is pulling from Urbanspoon, and Yelp, and all these different services available on Bing today.

And, finally, we bring together context. You’ll notice it actually has a link here where it’s identified the neighborhood that this restaurant is in. If I tap on that, it takes me into a brand new experience in “Mango” called Local Scout. Local Scout allows me to live like a local. I can see everything that’s going on at a given neighborhood, and explore the world around me. I can see everything there is to eat and drink. I can scroll over and see what there is to see and do, and you’ll notice that it has things like farmers markets, it has tours, all of the points of interest that are really important to this given neighborhood available right here.

I can see all the shopping that’s nearby, and we categorize that as well. And then, finally, it keeps track of all my favorites. So, when I land in new cities, or I figure out where I like to be, I just favorite all of these items, and it will always represent those to me when I show up in Local Scout later.

So, I can see here that I actually have a couple of things that are favorited. Oh, the Manhattan Mall is close by. Maybe I want to get some new threads for the movie. And I can go in and tap on that and bring in the Quick Card for Manhattan Mall. Now, one thing you may notice right away is that we actually have indoor maps as well. So, instead of just showing this location on a map, and where it sits, we actually go straight into the Bing maps experience, which has now been enhanced with indoor maps for malls and other public locations. How many times have you gone to a store, and you’d want to know where in the mall it actually is? And so here I can see that, indeed, Aeropostale is right there.

I can actually change levels using the little user experience selector right here. I can go to level two. It loads all that in as well. In fact, I may just want to know if there’s a certain store. And so, I can go into a directory. And you’ll notice without using separate applications, I have all of this core to the Bing experience. So, I can see all of the stores. I can see where they’re located in the indoor map, and all of that is brought back together.

Now, if I go back into the Local Scout experience, there is one other thing that I wanted to check out. You see, with the Local Scout, we bring together all of the points of interest, and part of that is showing you what’s going on at a venue beyond what you may expect, which is hours of operation, and phone calls, and things that you would expect from kind of a mapping type of information card. And so for that you’ll actually notice Madison Square Garden has a card here as well.

Now, instead of just giving me all that basic information, and hours of operation, we actually bring all of the upcoming events that are coming to these areas as well. We’ve scraped the Web and brought all of this forward. So you can see, in fact, Josh Grobin is coming soon. I’ll make sure to mark my calendar. All of that is available right here as well.

So, hopefully, you’re starting to get the sense that we’re weaving together the Web’s information, presenting it to you in these cards, and allowing you to take action by connecting to applications.

The final thing I wanted to show in that area is how we actually use sensors to start a search and then have it completed with all the things that I’ve just described. With Bing we had the ability with Windows Phone 7 to do a text search, and to do a search with your voice. But now we’ve added Bing Vision as well.

I actually borrowed a book from Andy, he was reading it on the way over, it’s Miley Cyrus’ latest biography. It’s a fantastic read. And I’m going to go ahead and do a search for this book to find more information. The way that I’m going to do that is actually with a visual search.

So, built into the phone I just hit the little “I,” and I hover over the book. And I could just as easily be doing this with QR codes, with bar codes, and it will automatically start detecting what the book is. I tap there, and I’m brought to a Quick Card for the book, where I am given a description, I’m seeing the lowest price, $2.74, fantastic. I can see the ratings of the book, so I can decide whether or not it’s going to be a good buy for me. And I can also see all the different prices.

But, just like we showed before, we also connect to the applications that actually have a lot to do with books. Best Buy sells books. Amazon shopping sells books. And you know what, Kindle is actually pretty good at books, as well. So, if I go and tap on Kindle it will take me straight into the Kindle app, and using this app shortcut it hands off all of the data that it just captured, which is the name, the book, the description, and it will bring me into the Kindle store, so that I can find that book and then I’ll be able to purchase that book and have it delivered to my phone.

So, we’ll load up the Kindle store here. “Miles To Go,” perfect, Kindle Edition auto-delivered wirelessly. I could be reading this in a matter of seconds. That will load up and I can go ahead and try a sample, or purchase the book and have it delivered to my Windows phone, just like you can on the Windows Phone Kindle app today.

So, I’ve gone literally from taking a picture of something with Bing Vision, handing that off into an application, and now I’ll be reading that book all in a matter of seconds.

Well, that’s it for the demos today. I hope you enjoyed them and thanks a lot.

(Applause.)

ANDY LEES: So, as you see, finally the phone has become a first-class citizen on the Internet. With IE9 we harness the full power of the phone and the Internet and provide app-like experiences in the browser. But, with “Mango” the Internet goes beyond the browser. You can find answers and act with integrated search, using location, voice, text and pictures. And we scrape the Web for you to bring together the key information and actions from a variety of different websites, into a single place with Quick Cards.

You can discover the world around you, so that you can live like a local wherever you happen to be with local scout. And finally, we blur the lines between the Internet and phone apps using App Connect, because after all an answer in your hand is worth two on your PC.

So far we have shown you how Windows Phone “Mango” makes it smarter and easier for communications, Internet and applications. And we’ve demoed a host of new capabilities like groups, threads, multitasking, Live Tiles, IE9, Local Scout and App Connect. These are some of the important capabilities and new features that we deliver with Windows Phone “Mango.” But, there’s a lot more than we have time to show today. In fact, there are more than 500 new features. So, we’ll be going through and taking them in more depth over the coming weeks, including new capabilities in music, maps, calendaring, OneNote and social networking.

This certainly is a very big release, and one that will be worth waiting for. But, the good news is that we’re not going to make you wait. This release will be available in the fall, and that is less than 12 months since we launched Windows Phone 7. Users will get this through a free upgrade. They’ll receive a notification on their phone telling them to just simply plug it into their PC, and then all of these capabilities will come down and their phone will be upgraded.

We set out to make the smartphone smarter and easier, and we did that through two strategies, a focus on innovation of software on the phone, with the consumer at the center. But, also we talked about the need for a vibrant ecosystem. The ecosystem is made up of developers, service providers, operators and handset makers. Now, we’ve had fantastic momentum since launch. And “Mango,” we are expecting a significant acceleration with the support that we get from our partners.

We started out seven months ago with zero applications in our marketplace. And today we have over 18,000. I’m pleased to be able to announce that today we’re making available the “Mango” tools so that developers can start writing their applications right today, so that they’re ready for when the update and the new phones are available in the fall.

The second area is how services really help users do new scenarios on the phone. Well, as you’ve seen we build core services into the main phone experience. And you’ve seen how we’ve enhanced things like Windows Live and Facebook. We support new services like Twitter, LinkedIn and Office 365. And also, through the capability of Windows Live Connect, you can enhance further social networks into your experience, and of course have applications. In April, we announced with Skype that they would be designing an application for “Mango” for the first time. That will mean that you can Skype your friends on Windows Phone “Mango.”

The third area is operators. Now, operators do a lot more than just light up the phone with connectivity and distribute phones and provide customer service. We’re enabling operators to add significant value through the software and services that they provide with Windows Phone “Mango.” The great news with “Mango” is that we will be supporting a lot more geographies, so we’ll have a lot of new operator partners that we’ll be announcing over the coming months.

We support more languages, our core services are in more countries, and we have lower priced phones, so that we can increase the addressable market. In fact, the addressable market for “Mango” is four times larger than the addressable market was for Windows Phone 7. The final piece of the ecosystem jigsaw is handset makers. In Windows Phone 7 we had great support from HTC, Samsung and LG. I’m pleased to be able to say that they will all be launching new phones that run Windows Phone “Mango.”

And we have enabled more differentiation for them to have more choice for consumers, including 4G phones.

I’m also pleased that today we’re announcing some new hardware partners, who will provide handsets around “Mango,” including Acer, Fujitsu and ZTE, who are all new to the Windows Phone family, more choice, more price points in more geographies. And finally, in February we announced our strategic partnership with Nokia that goes beyond just handsets. Nokia brings scale and innovation to the ecosystem. They sold more than 400 million phones in the last 12 months and over 100 million of which were smartphones.

And I’m pleased to be able to say that Windows Phone “Mango” will be the release that is used for the first Nokia Windows Phones. We already have Nokia phones running Windows Phone “Mango” in our labs today. So, for the ecosystem the stars are aligning. And we think that “Mango” will be a tipping point of opportunity.

So, here we are seven months after we launched Windows Phone 7. We set out on a mission to redefine smartphones to make them smarter, and easier, so that people could do more and have more fun. Today we are unveiling the next chapter, with a significant release, code-named Windows Phone “Mango.” And our focus is what people want to do most, communication, applications and Internet, but taking each of those to the next level. “Mango” is not just easier and faster, but it knows where you’re going. The developer tools are available today. The update and new phones will be available from the fall.

So, I want to thank you for your time and I think this fall will be the best yet for us, and our partners. You’ve seen an awful lot from us in seven months, but you haven’t seen anything yet.

Thank you. (Applause.)

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