According industry experts the first ever Mango powered phone is expected to hit the selves later this year; however an official timescale for release has not yet been disclosed.

Terry Myerson, Corporate Vice President of Windows Phone Engineering said, “This marks the point in the development process where we hand code to our handset and mobile operator partners to optimize Mango for their specific phone and network configurations. Here on the Windows Phone team, we now turn to preparing for the update process. The Mango update for current Windows Phone handsets will be ready this fall, and of course will come pre-installed on new Windows Phones.”

The new Windows Phone Mango update will bring close to 500 new features to the OS. Some of these include integration with Internet Explorer 9 and app multi-tasking. I am waiting eagerly to see how Microsoft will try impact the smartphone market with its new OS.

Gustavo Fuchs, director Mobility, Microsoft Middle East and Africa says the Windows Phone operating system has so far received great feedback from customers in the seven months since it has been released.

“Ninety percent of people are extremely pleased with the product, 93% of people recommend the product to colleagues and family and the return rates on the smartphones are very, very low, which we know is not a common practice in the market,” he said.

One of the promising feature I liked in this update is users can group together contacts from multiple sources, such as Facebook and Gmail and a user can text all these contacts at the same time.

The phones allow users to switch between text, Windows Live Messenger and Facebook chat in the same conversation. Photo tagging and face-recognition is also enabled on the Mango update, allowing users to communicate on the go.

The new update allows users to multi-task and the enterprise clients can enjoy corporate messenger. Currently Windows Phone application market has over 17,000. Let’s see how Microsoft fights the smartphone race. Currently Android is heading for a major breakthrough as day by day its market share is increasing.