It looks like the Mango update for Windows Phone 7 phones will be bringing a few more fruity surprises besides support for IE9 and HTML5.
Come Autumn time, HD7 and Omnia 7 owners will be able to thrill to the delights of turn-by-turn navigation with their Bing Maps (yay) and make use of a Shazam/TrackID style service called Bing Audio.
This comes to us via Phone Arena, who are also saying that something called Bing Video will be included. This is a barcode scanner app that’ll read things like QR codes, barcodes and *drumroll* will feature OCR (optical character recognition) as well.
This should allow you to scan and read texts from books and print outs straight to your phone, in a similar way that the recently updated Google Docs for Android does.
The final fruity revelation this morning is that Mango will also allow you to dictate text messages using’s Microsoft’s TellMe service. In other words, you talk to your Windows Phone 7 phone and it’ll transcribe your words into a text.
Sounds a little bit like what Google Voice Actions lets you do (again) on Android phones. And, if we remember rightly, Android phones in the UK got turn-by-turn directions with Google Maps over a year ago now…
It might sounds a little monkey see monkey do, but these are all welcome additions to the Windows Phone 7 platform.
Still no definite date on when we can expect the Mango harvest to arrive, other than that vague Autumn window. We’re looking forwards to getting our teeth into these new features and seeing how they run alongside Shazam and their Google equivalents.
Source: Windows Phone Dev Podcast via WPCentral
Image credit: Flickr user joyosity
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