First Windows Phone 7 Mango handset to hit KDDI in September

The next version of Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform will finally bear fruit in September when a phone featuring the Mango update will hit Japanese shelves.

The software giant has now officially signed off on the RTM version off the OS and in a blog post, Terry Myerson, corporate vice president of phone engineering for Windows Phone said that this, “marks the point in the development process where we hand code to our handset and mobile that operator partners to optimize Mango for their specific phone and network configurations.”

The CDMA handset, catchily dubbed the IS12T and manufactured by Toshiba-Fujitsu will be launched by Japanese operator KDDI. Sporting a 3.7in display and a hefty 13.2 megapixel camera it will be powered by a Qualcomm MSM8655 CPU and have 32MB of flash memory. It will also feature Bluetooth, wifi, and be waterproof.

Microsoft’s Mango update offers 500 new features, including major additons such as multi-tasking, copy and paste, and threaded conversations that integrate text messages with updates from Facebook and Windows Live Messenger. It will also feature Internet Explorer 9 and support for HTML5.

Microsoft is looking to claw back market share in the smartphone market in which it has fallen into last place, behind not only the dominant Apple and Google, but also RIM and Nokia. The first Windows Phone based Nokia handsets, since the announcement of the partnership with the Finnish company, are not expected until 2012.