WP Tango bringing in important fragmentation and spec changes

Windows Phone Tango is coming soon, but it’s getting a mixed bag of improvements / disappointments, along with it. Let’s hear the bad news first. Russian site, WP7forum did some in-depth trialing on a developer phone and they’ve unearthed some important, new things. As reported by GSMArena, first up all upcoming Tango phones will have to do with just 256 MB of RAM, as opposed to 512 MB of RAM that was present in the earlier devices. What this means is that your next Windows Phone might just have 256 MB of RAM, and if you’re having an Android phone, you’re mostly ‘upgrading’ your phone from 512 MB or 1GB of RAM to 256 MB of RAM. Upgrading doesn’t sound that good now, eh? However, it’s important to note that this will also bring down the cost of the phone, so while your specs might not be top notch, your pricing will most probably go easy on the wallet. Second, because of the low RAM, naturally your phone won’t support the more heavy duty apps and also, if you’re having third party Live tiles then you’ll have to manually keep updating them, as there won’t be an auto-update feature. That’s quite a bummer, honestly. 

Let's do the Tango!?

Let’s get to the videos section. If your next WP7 phone has 256 MB of RAM, then you’ll have bitrate limitations up to 4 Mbps. This applies to streaming as well. Next, podcast mangeability via the phone won’t be possible and lastly, your photos can only be manually updated to SkyDrive, auto update won’t be possible. The current 5MP camera limitation has been lowered to 3MP, which might take the 720p resolution for a toss. With so many restrictions, the only plausible explanation is that Microsoft is readying some really low budget WP Tango phones for the market. 

Now for the pros. Users will be able to import and export contacts from their SIMs and auto update applications through Zune. There will be increased support for additional countries and pre-installed apps will increase in number. Some MMS updates have been made as well, including multiple uploading of audio and video files. This cons list is definitely higher than the pros, here and we’re pretty sure Microsoft is talking about really low end budget handsets. What this also means is that we’re bound to see some fragmentation in their handsets in the near future. Let’s hope some more ‘features’ are added before Tango actually launches.