Windows Phone version history

A minor update released in 2012 known as Tango, along with other bug fixes, would also lower the hardware requirements to allow for devices with 800 MHz CPUs and 256 MB of RAM to run Windows Phone.

[13] The lower requirements were adopted in order to allow the development of lower-cost devices, particularly to target emerging markets such as China.

[14] Also confirmed are 23 additional markets[35] including; Bahrain, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Iraq, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam.

The Nokia Lumia 610 and ZTE Orbit,[36] introduced at Mobile World Congress in 2012, are the first phones to run the Tango update.

General Distribution Release 1 (GDR1; also referred to as Update 1) adds new language and region support for Cortana, the option to organize apps into folders on the Start Screen, SMS forwarding of multiple messages, improvements to Xbox Music, a live tile for the Windows Phone Store and an option for sandboxing applications.

To accomplish this, Microsoft moved away from open standards and adopted non-standard features used in Safari and Chrome, implemented browser detection, improved page rendering by detecting legacy WebKit features, brought support for HTML5, and fixed interoperability issues with bad HTML code.