When you go to a restaurant or stay at a hotel, sometimes you are invited to write on a comment card and put any opinions or helpful hints in a suggestion box. Now that Microsoft is pushing out the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) update to Windows Phone 7 users, it has also decided to solicit some help from its audience via its own virtual suggestion box. The official Windows Phone blog site directs visitors to that new feature.
As the blog site states, this is more than just sending Microsoft a comment like, "I don"t like the color of the tiles." The suggestion box web site also highlights a number of popular ideas that people have to improve or fix Windows Phone 7 and, much like web sites Digg or Reddit, allows people to vote for those topic and debate them among themselves. The suggestion box is just for discussing Windows Phone, features, not for selling your ideas. As the blog site states, "Please do not send any novel or patentable ideas, samples or demos which you do not want to grant a license to Microsoft. See the "Terms of Use" link below for more information. Please limit your suggestions to 25 words or less."
Some of the "hotter" topics for discussion at the moment are adding toast notifications for incoming emails, including the option to remove or disable the capacitive buttons, storing save game files in a cloud-based system, adding screenshot support for the active screen and many more. It should be interesting to see if Microsoft actually adds some of these user-suggested features in upcoming Windows Phone 7 updates.