Microsoft’s Eric Hautala told Windows Phone​ owners that the Mango update was finally near rolling out to existing devices. The 7.5 upgrade should arrive in the “next week or two” on the first wave. As with the NoDo update early in the year, Microsoft will have a status page showing how far into testing each release is and how soon it will arrive.
The company used the timing to warn against using leaked Mango installs. While the core OS is identical across every phone, each carrier and hardware maker still has optimizations that need to go through, according to Hautala. With NoDo, some primarily Samsung-using phone owners with bootleg firmware found themselves locked out of future releases as they ended up dropped out of the officially recognized firmware update cycle.
Mango is already shipping on one phone, Japan’s Toshiba-Fujitsu IS12T, and is due to arrive in other countries within roughly a month. AT&T hasn’t said when it plans to ship the HTC Titan and Samsung Focus S, but it’s unofficially believed that both will show in mid-October.
The update adds several major features to help Windows Phone catch up to rivals, including multitasking, front-facing camera support, IM and Twitter integration, and an Internet Explorer 9-based web browser.
