14 DAY TRIAL // During the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft’s partners announced the release of low-end devices powered by a new flavor of Windows Phone, codenamed Tango.
The new OS flavor comes with support for much lower hardware specifications than before, thus allowing handset vendors to design cheaper smartphones.
Through this move, Microsoft and hardware partners aim at bringing the Windows Phone platform in the hands of more people.
However, since cheaper hardware means lower performance, the new Windows Phone Tango OS comes with a series of changes meant to compensate for that.
Just as previously rumored, the platform can now be installed on handsets that pack only 256MB of RAM, which means a crippled experience when it comes to multitasking, for example.
On Windows Phone devices that sport only 256MB of RAM, users won’t be able to take advantage of fast app switching capabilities, just as they would on other handsets.
Microsoft decided that it would be best if generic background agents were disabled in Windows Phone Tango. This a move that frees up more RAM for foreground applications, the company explains.
Moreover, they won’t be able to take full advantage of the video streaming capabilities of the platform, at least not when it comes to some HD video codecs.
There will also be some other limitations, such as the impossibility to manage podcast subscriptions from these handsets, or the inability to watch video podcasts. The Local Scout won’t be available either, nor the automatic uploading of photos to SkyDrive.
However, it appears that limitations is not the only thing that Windows Phone Tango comes with, as users will also benefit from some new features and enhancements, including improved MMS functions and SIM management, or a new location icon.
The main idea behind all these changes was to ensure that the owners of low-end Windows Phone devices would benefit from the same fast experience that other platform users would.