Nokia’s Lumia 610 will be the
first Windows Phone 7.5 Tango or Refresh as it will be officially
called, to hit Indian shelves for an estimated price tag of just
Rs.11,000. If this actually happens then it’s going to give stiff
competition to the mainstream Androids that are currently enjoying the
limelight in this price segment. We’ve now learnt, through a Windows centric Spanish blog,
that Microsoft will be officially launching Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh
sometime in June. This update is designed for low-end WP7 devices that
are fitted with 256MB RAM and slower processors making them cheaper to
produce while delivering similar experience as Windows Phone Mango.
The source also claims that the Tango update is already ready and
is currently in the hands of mobile phone operators who are testing it
out. Some of the newer features of Refresh include a location awareness
icon and better multimedia messaging. Certain features from Mango won’t
work on Refresh due to the hardware limitations but Microsoft says that
the experience should be the same, in the sense, the interface is going
tobe just as slick and fluid, which is one of the highlights of Windows
Phone. The Lumia 610 could be Nokia’s trump card in lifting the company
out of the slump they’ve been in. This opens a whole new market for
Microsoft as well, as they can now go after the mainstream crowd, which
is currently being dominated by Android. WP 7.5 Refresh promises to
deliver the same buttery smooth experience, despite the reduction in
hardware specification and they achieve this by reducing the number of
background processes. With that out of the way, fewer CPU cycles are
taken and lesser RAM is needed as well.