Mango Officially Released to Manufacturers (RTM)!

Well it looks like those rumors were off by just a few days: Microsoft just announced via the Windows Phone Blog that their latest and greatest build of Mango has been released to manufacturers! For those who may not know what this means, we'll translate it for you: Mango is complete. Now do you get why this is a big deal? Here's a quote from Terry Myerson's post about whats happening now and whats coming next:

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.

Rest easy, because Microsoft is already hard at work on making sure those Mango updates go smoothly for current-gen hardware. Judging from the overall pretty high success rate of those who updated to the Mango Beta, we'd say that things will probably go smoother. So who brought the champagne? We need to celebrate!

Side note: Did you catch Myerson saying the update "will be ready by Fall" but he curiously didn't say the same about the hardware? We have a feeling Mango hardware is going to come out sooner than those updates. Need proof? Microsoft announced RTM just hours before the Fujitsu event. Hmm....

Source: Windows Phone Blog