Windows Phone Mango in detail: Office, email and other productivity tools
By Martin James on July 26,
 2011 at 00:00,

We've been having a good look at what Windows Phone Mango has lined up for Nokia users, and we round off our coverage by covering productivity tools like email, messaging, Office and the like. Read on for more.

Windows Phone Mango on the Nokia E Series: fit for business

The switch to Windows Phone 7 certainly gives us a lot to think about, but as we've been discovering over the past few days thanks to PocketNow's in-depth preview, Windows Phone Mango ups the ante quite a bit for Microsoft's mobile operating system, and it's no different when it comes to Mango's productivity tools.

There's quite a bit of change to the Messaging Hub, which brings together traditional SMS/MMS messaging, Facebook Chat and Windows Live Messenger in a single interface.

All are treated equally by Mango, so you'll be notified in the same way for each when a new message comes in when the handset is locked, for instance. Mango's voice features, meanwhile, can read your messages out loud and convert your own voice messages into text in return.

In the Messenger app itself, the threaded conversations feature remain as it was before in Windows Phone 7, but each thread now aggregates all kinds of message together, with each network type indicated by a small label.

When it comes to email, meanwhile, you can now link email accounts to a single Hub and program listing, as opposed to each having its own tile as is the case currently – effectively giving you a unified inbox for a number of accounts if you so choose, or the ability to group or arrange your accounts however you choose.

Interestingly, you can now pin individual inbox folders to the Start screen, a novel way of making sure you're able to keep an eye out for specific types of mail, regardless of account.

Moving on to Office, meanwhile, the redesigned Office Hub is more deeply integrated with SkyDrive, while the panes have been reorganised too to better promote OneNote pages.

The documents pane now lists documents as Live tile squares, while the search function – which now comes via its own button on the touchscreen rather than the main Search hardware button – offers more versatile search options in terms of what you can search for, and where specifically you can search.

The locations pane, meanwhile, lists Phone and SkyDrive as two main locations, but you can add further library locations too.

Setting up Office 365, meanwhile, has been made much easier too, with just a couple of taps then the entry of your email and password all that's required to get up and running.

OneNote has some new features too, including improvements to the file download process, whle Excel now lets you select multiple cells and create your own formulas, as well as adding autosum and filtering features, and adding an “insert chart” command.

Closing off our coverage of Mango's productivity-based changes, Exchange tasks now sync with the Calendar's To-Dos tab, together with Windows Live Hotmail To-Dos.

Multiple calendars are supported too, in that any calendars you add to Windows Live, Exchange and Google will show up, as well as any Windows Live Group calendars you're signed up to.

Last but certainly not least, the Mango calendar app now supports Facebook events too, and you can set it to only show events you've respond to. When you open a Facebook event in the Calendar, you can see all the usual details from the organiser, along with a Wall tab for comments and a Guests tab to see who's attending, maybe attending, and definitely not attending. Needless to say, you'll be able to respond directly yourself from within the Calendar.