People Hub in Windows Phone Mango demoed in video

Microsoft has been showing off videos of features in the upcoming Windows Phone Mango update. Earlier we saw the social network integration, and now we're also seeing an interesting new feature called the People Hub. The People Hub video is presented by Microsoft's People Hub Project Manager Greg, who is quite obviously a Microsoft engineer and not an Apple engineer. Greg was not made for life in front of the camera. The main features of the People Hub are in new contact live tile features, and in contact histories.

The idea behind both of the main People Hub features is the same as many in Windows Phone: to get you in, out, and away from your phone. The new contact live tile features do this by giving you easy access to new messages from contacts. So, rather than having to sift through e-mails, texts or social network messages to get the new messages from a specific contact, you can easily get those messages from that contact's live tile.

The other main change is the contact history, which aggregates messages from all different services into one history for each contact. So, theoretically regardless of where the message came from, it should make it easier to find when it's all in one place. Then, once you've found the message, you can launch into the specific app that message came from. Greg says that this means it doesn't matter what social network you use, but this feature is suspiciously like Microsoft's favorite social network Facebook and its unified messaging system.

source: WPCentral