Windows Phone midweek roundup: Tango, Apollo, and low-end cameras

It’s been a crazy day24 hours for Windows Phone, but instead of bringing you the information spread out over several posts, we are going to put them into this big bucket of knowledge. It will save you some clicking, and your index finger could use the rest. With no further ado:

Tango: New Information is Out

Here are the critical bits: In Tango, the minimum RAM requirement is only 256 megabytes; cameras a low as 3 megapixels will be supported; podcasts will not be manageable on-device; photo upload to SkyDrive will not be turned on automatically; not all apps will run (we assume that apps that require more processing juice is what is meant here); and 3rd party Live Tiles, well, won’t always be live.

In a nutshell: those are the corners that are being cut to allow Windows Phone to go after the very low ends of the market. In the long-term, this could lead Windows Phone greatly expanding its market share, or in the watering of its user experience to the point of it being all but feature-phone strength. We’ll have to know more to decide.

Apollo: App Porting

A Microsoft job posting has revealed a very important piece of Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo. Here’s what it says the job will (partially) entail: “Automated testing of marketplace applications written for Mango, but running on Apollo.”

What this means is that apps that exist as they are now should run sans hitch on every phone that has reached Windows Phone 7.5, which is to say every phone sold this holiday season, and every first generation handset that has upgraded. Not directly related, but it’s possible to port Windows Phone 7.5 apps to Windows 8, if you were curious.

That’s just about the least possible space that we could have taken to catch you up. Oftentimes we like to stretch our legs, but when you need to know, and now, we will try to keep the word count down. Now, back to work!