I’ve liked Windows Phone Mango since I first laid eyes on it, but the truth of the matter is that most of the features being implemented are merely catching up to competing platforms.
The Bing integration and voice-to-text capabilities are… pretty cool. But other than that, as I said, Mango is playing catch-up. The addition of a video chat app on the Mango-powered HTC Titan is yet another example of that, but it’s coming.
Despite the incredibly unfortunate name sharing situation, the Tango video chat app (unrelated to the next WP7 update codenamed Tango) is actually pretty cool, albeit a bit late to the party. In the video below, Aaron Woodman of the Windows Phone team perhaps too enthusiastically details the way video chat works on that massive 4.7-inch Titan screen (courtesy of the Windows Phone Blog). Like Apple’s FaceTime and the Tango app for Android, Tango for WP lets you enjoy the “see what I see” switcharoo between front and rear-facing cameras. Oddly enough, Google Talk has yet to get this figured out.
What’s cool is that the Tango app for Mango is cross-platform, offering support for iOS, Android, and PC. Microsoft happens to own a pretty awesome VoIP service called Skype, so this Tango app may have some pretty serious competition on the Windows platform in the future.