We're slowly getting closer to the grand unveiling of the first Nokia Windows Phone, but while it might seem like a long wait, it does at least give us the chance to take a good long look at what we have to look forward to.

Windows Phone Mango's updated Games Hub: what Nokia users can look forward to

Our latest Mango-infused preview takes a closer look at gaming and social networking on Mango, and as with our previous in-depth previews of what the new Microsoft mobile OS has in store for Nokia users, our thanks goes to PocketNow for wading through the 500-plus new features to pull out the highlights.

There are plenty of reasons to be excited about Windows Phone coming to Nokia, but gaming has to be one of the biggest. Microsoft's Xbox ecosystem is arguably the leading gaming platform around, and with Mango, mobile gaming is set to take a big step forward.

Gaming on Mango is fully integrated with Xbox Live, so there's no need to install the Xbox Live Extras app to be able to check out which of your Xbox Live connections are online, for instance, and see their scores and achievements for the games you're taking on.

It's a far more community-based approach to gaming than you'll be used to, but behind it all of course are the games themselves, which is a fast-growing attraction on the Windows Phone platform.

Mango adds support for instant resuming of your gaming exploits while multitasking, though it'll need titles that support it. As things stand, games essentially restart, but then resume while using the fast tasks switcher.

As things stand, meanwhile, social networking is mainly taken care of by the Me and People Hubs, which round up respectively what's going on in your world, and in the worlds of your contacts. Of course there are individual apps for the services themselves, but Windows Phone gets you started in a big way by incorporating a lot of their key functionality into its core.

In Mango, in addition to showing and letting you update your Facebook and Windows Live status, the Me Hub also shows notifications and lets you post messages and view basic profile info. You can also use the Me tile to check in to Facebook Places and Windows Live.

As for the People Hub, it still functions primarily as your contacts book, but also rolls in social networking info and has a What's New tab to check out the latest updates. New to Mango is the the ability to filter this information to a specific service, so you can see Facebook, Windows Live, LinkedIn etc updates all together, or individually.

In the list of individual contacts, selecting an entry not only shows their key info and latest updates and posts in the What's New section as before, but there's also now the ability to check out their latest pics too.

Another new feature is the option to collect contacts together in Groups. The Family group is an obvious place to start, for instance.

At this stage Groups seems a fairly limited feature, however – it only supports up to 20 contacts in any one group, and you can't sync them in any way, so as to manage from a desktop PC, for instance. Hopefully some of these features will be in place by the time Mango rolls out on the first Nokia Windows Phones!

Are you excited about getting to grips with gaming and social networking on your Mango Nokia? Give us your thoughts in the Comments below!