Wow, it looks like Windows Phone users won’t have to fork out money to use premium versions of music-recognition apps like Shazam in the future. The Mango update to Windows Phone 7 eschews the need for such apps, since the new Bing has a feature called audio search that does the same thing.
Users can just launch Bing audio search by hitting the music note icon in the search menu, and the phone will start listening for music. Bing will then search though its library and try to match the recorded sample to a song in the Marketplace. If a match is found, the artist and song will appear in a popup window, with a direct link to the Marketplace, which lets you purchase and download the song.
It doesn’t have advanced features like searching for lyrics, or videos, or sharing it with your buddies, but I’m sure it will probably find its way into the phone sometime in the future. How many of you are running the leaked build of Mango, and what do you think of it so far?