Microsoft: Mango delivery now up to partners

Microsoft has shared with the world the current status of Mango: It’s up to the company’s manufacturing partners to get it out; Microsoft now has its hands off.

Even more, the company claims to have delivered the product early. Mango, the first important update to the Windows Phone platform, was due before this year’s holiday season. That it is out to carriers and manufacturers in August does seem to carry a message that the firm wants Mangoed handsets in the wild as soon as possible.

The new information came by way of a tweet by Peter Wissinger, the director of Microsoft’s Mobile Business Group in the Nordic region, that said (translated):

Official statement: Now it’s up to our manufacturing partners to release mangos to our customers. Microsoft has delivered complete mango earlier than planned to the manufacturers. Feels good now.

It is very hard to misread that statement.

Let’s go over Mango for a moment. Mango itself is a collection of feature upgrades and performance boosts that are designed to run on extant hardware. In other words, Mango is designed to run on every single Windows Phone device currently in the market. However, Mango itself, and a few of its feature changes, will spur a new round of hardware. The question therefore becomes, how will OEMs build something new, for a platform that requires very little in terms of handset performance improvements?

It is an open question. The first Windows Phone handset that will launch solved the problem by going mostly waterproof and including a 13 megapixel camera.

Whatever the case, Mango is truly ‘out,’ as this tweet has shown. Therefore it is now simply a waiting game for hardware manufacturers to get their new phones out. Let’s hope that they don’t tarry.