The developers behind the Times of India Windows Phone application have noticed two Nokia devices using their software that have yet to be announced, the Nokia Lumia 900 and the Nokia Champagne. Now the Champagne we’ve already seen in logs before, back in early November, so now that we’re seeing it again in the logs of a totally different app means it’s pretty much confirmed that it exists and is out in the wild. The Nokia Lumia 900 though, that device comes with a lot of baggage. Days before Nokia announced the Lumia 710 and the Lumia 800, we got a leak suggesting that there was also going to be a device called the Nokia Lumia 900 shown off at Nokia World 2011. That obviously didn’t happen. Codenamed “Ace”, the Lumia 900 was supposed to come with a 4.3 inch screen, 8 megapixel camera, 1 GB of RAM, and NFC. We got a lot of flack for that leak because of those last two specifications. Microsoft dictates the hardware that Windows Phone can run on, so there’s a reason why every new Windows Phone on the market has the same 1.4 GHz Qualcomm processor and 512 MB of RAM. If the Nokia Lumia 900 was indeed real, then the support for 1 GB of RAM and NFC would indicate that it’s running a newer version of Windows Phone.
Enter Tango, the update to the current version of Windows Phone, known as Mango. The Times of India logs we mentioned earlier show that the Lumia 900 and Champagne run Windows Phone 7.10.8725, which we’re assuming is a beta version of Tango. Microsoft hasn’t officially announced Tango, though we suspect they’ll do it at either CES next month or at MWC in February. What will it bring to the table? Rumors we heard earlier this year suggest Tango will let handset vendors build devices that use lower resolution screens, thereby enabling BlackBerry style form factor handsets to be built. It’s also said that Tango will add LTE support.
Now we just have to wait and see.