Microsoft’s Mango aims to connect people, not apps, but will it sell?

Microsoft yesterday unveiled its latest Windows Phone mobile operating system, called Mango. Some of its 500 new features are aimed at gathering information from across apps to create conversations, rather than leaving information in different silos.

Using a smartphone can often be a “sea” of different apps, “from calls, texts, email and instant messages to status updates, Tweets, check-ins, photo posting and tagging. To help people stay on top of that growing complexity, the Mango release organizes information around the person or group people want to interact with, not the app they have to use,” the Mango press release states.

The new features are also hoped to improve multitasking and make apps and the operating system work more efficiently together, PCWorld reported.

The update will be free for all Windows Phone 7 customers, but they won’t be able to get it until autumn, after the OS official launches.

Windows Phone 7 is “struggling to capture developer interest,” but unfortunately it may be “too little, too late,” paidContent wrote. “The company’s main hope is that its deal with Nokia … can put Windows Phone 7 handsets on store shelves across Europe and other partners (Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE) can help make up the difference elsewhere in order to get volume around the world … but that’s likely not going to take place in the U.S.: phone makers like Samsung and HTC with prominent U.S. businesses are much better known for their Android handsets, and have spent much more time and money promoting those devices.”

The Guardian (based in the UK, not the U.S., as paidContent is) disagreed, reporting that the Windows Phone will likely be one of the three top smartphone platforms in the next few years, competing with Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, and surpassing RIM’s BlackBerry:

“Its user interface really won't matter. It's not Mango that will make it sell. It's Nokia [which Microsoft has partnered with]. Quite what its market share will be in the US and Europe - and whether it will be as large as in other regions - is less sure, but (reality check) those regions aren't the world,” the report stated. “A prediction? Windows Phone should easily get 20% of the smartphone market by the end of 2012. It could conceivably do better.”

Image: Microsoft