I’ve had a WP 7 since last December and have really enjoyed carrying it around and have found it very useful and overall pretty easy to use. After a year since the initial roll-out, Mango, the much anticipated update is here! There are over 500 updates with this release.

Here is a snapshot of major updates, courtesy of the WP 7.5 Insider. All these features are built in and part of the WP 7 OS and I’ve been busy checking out some of them and I’ll talk about a few I’ve been using, so keep reading…

People Hub

The people hub was pretty good before, but now it’s so comprehensive. I can pull up my husband’s tile and I can look at any updates he’s posted to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter (if he used all of these, I would see them, that is!). But I also have a history of all our phone calls, text messages and emails too. Anything we’ve done in the digital world is there as a reminder, review or just to catch up. I can pin his tile to my start screen for even easier access. The people hub is really the center for keeping in touch with family and friends—everything is in one place and always updated for me. I really like having pictures of my contacts show up beside their names—and I didn’t have to do the work to put them there. It was done for me by the phone.

One other handy thing to add here – when I go into the ‘What’s New’ section, I can choose to see updates from just Facebook, just LinkedIn, or just from one of my Windows Live accounts. I like having that choice.

Combined Email

I was looking forward to this feature because I had it on my Blackberry. But now that I’ve combined some of my mail accounts (work-related), I’m thinking I may go back to having them each separated because I can tell at a glance which account has new mail and if I need to check it. Click here to be taken to a quick tutorial on how to get your combined/unified mailbox set up.

Internet Explorer

This IE is version 9 and it is FAST! They say it has a hardware accelerator in it and they weren’t kidding. I’ve tried it out and it’s super fast. Another great feature is that I can push the windows button and just tell it what I’m looking for. It’s pretty accurate and faster than typing!

Voice To Text

This feature can be used for texting someone or for telling the phone to call someone. Here’s an article containing a video about how it’s done. I just got a text from my sister and it asked if it could read it to me, so I let it and them responded back by voice – how easy!

Ringtones

There are new ringtones and the ability to make my own. This is something on my to do list.

I like the new features and I think it’ll take me awhile to find and learn how to use them. I’m especially glad for the mango update because it fixed some problems I had. Before the update, I couldn’t upload my camera photos to anything but Flickr – yes strange. Well, I could upload to Facebook, but then that quit. Now I can upload to FB, SkyDrive or email. I can even auto-fix pics on the fly.

If you have a WP Mango tip – please leave me a comment – would love to hear it.