In a rather direct announcement today, Microsoft explained the coming Tango update to its Windows Phone platform. Speculation has been running hot that the update, placed in between Mango (Windows Phone 7.5) and Apollo (Windows Phone 8), would be a smaller refresh, and one likely designed to work in developing countries. As it turns out, that is the case. Microsoft, at a MSDN Seminar in Hong Kong, broke out the following information, asreported by WeLoveWP....

Unlike the last host of Patch Tuesday batches of software updates, September’swill containno fixes deemed ‘critical,’ and instead is comprised strictly of ‘important’ updates. Semantic differences aside, there are five bulletins that will be released on September 13th. Two deal with Windows, and three pertain to Office, of which two also impact ‘Microsoft server software.’ In other words, we are all quiet on the Western Front. Microsoft will not provided more detail as to exactly what is being updated until the patches are made available....

Let the trumpets sound and the nerds rejoice: The Xbox team and the folks who run the Star Wars franchise have come together to build something special. Or, at least, that seems to be the general market reaction to the freshly announced Star Wars themed Xbox 360 console. The console itself is dolled up to resemble R2-D2, and the controller mimics the faithful dolt-of-a-robot C-3P0. It was announced today at Comic-Con, a very fitting location....

Microsoft is proud of how well the Bing app for iPad is doing: “In April we released Bing for iPad and needless to say, we were humbled by the positive response we received. In the first three months, we had more than 5,000 ratings in the App Store and an average score of 4.7 stars (out of five stars). But what we really liked was all the great feedback on areas to improve and features to add....

Today Microsoftupdatedthe mobile version of Bing, its search engine. Bing, according to web analytics provider Clicky, currently hasnegligible mobile search market share. Ironically, the updates that are rolling out today do not work on the, you guessed it, Windows Phone 7 platform. Why is that? Because you need a browser that can handle HTML5, and until Mango and IE9 mobile land, every WP7 handset in the world is rocking IE7 mobile, which is a kludge of a browser....