Microsoft has confirmed that the next update to its Windows Phone operating system will indeed be called ‘Tango’, and it will come to all Windows Phones sometime after April.
Joe Belfiore, Head of the Windows Phone team, confirmed the details via an in-depth post on the official Windows Phone Developer Blog. Tango is not a major update to the platform as we previously thought, and the version number will stay at 7.5, which is the update known as ‘Mango’. This update is more of a way to make Windows Phone more suitable for low-powered, basic smartphones, in order to expand its market share and to reach new countries.
The first phone to run the Tango update is one that we’ve already seen: Nokia’s Lumia 610. Until now, Microsoft set a much higher standard for specifications in its Windows Phones, but the Lumia 610 rolls up with just 256MB of RAM. In the future we can expect to see cheaper Windows Phones with less RAM and other lower cost parts, such as the processor.
Tango isn’t just a refresh to help manufacturers make cheaper Windows Phones, it’s also going to improve the performance on all Windows Phones – even high end models like the HTC TITAN and Nokia Lumia 800. Microsoft has worked hard to tweak the software here and there to ensure everything runs as smoothly and quickly as possible on all makes and models that use its OS.
Of course, the main priority is reaching new markets for Microsoft. In the same blog post, Joe Belfiore also confirmed that the Windows Phone Marketplace would soon be available in Bahrain, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Iraq, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam.
Out of all of these, China is the biggest market for Microsoft. The new Nokia Lumia 610 is an affordable way to get a smartphone – a Windows Phone smartphone at that – for the masses, and we can see it selling very well there.
After Tango we can expect to see a major update known as Apollo, which carries many new features, some of which you can read about in detail on our previous blog here.
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Source: Windows Phone Blog