Microsoft has shared with the world the current status of Mango: It’s up to the company’s manufacturing partners to get it out; Microsoft now has its hands off. Even more, the company claims to have delivered the product early. Mango, the first important update to the Windows Phone platform, was due before this year’s holiday season. That it is out to carriers and manufacturers in August does seem to carry a message that the firm wants Mangoed handsets in the wild as soon as possible....

TNW Quick Hit: The IE team seems to have finally made up its mind as to when the world should be force-fed Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft’s latest browser. The date for the massive rollout of the new software to computers via Windows Update has been pushed back several months to late June. Originally, Microsoft promised to push out IE9 on the21st of March, but that date slipped by with Microsoft only days later acknowledging that thegiven day was wrong....

TNW Quick Hit: Microsoft has updated the information for the AT&T cellular network in terms of when its customers can expect to see the NoDo update reach their handsets. According to the update, the time frame for its release is now “early April.” Microsoft made the announcement by updatingits chartthat lists when each WP7 handset in United States will receive the update. The company has also prepared an international version that you can find herehere....

Google has put in a bid for some6,000 patentsthat are owned by the company Nortel, which is currently in bankruptcy. But Google’s$900 million offerfor the patents might have a hanger-on that they did not anticipate: Microsoft. In 2006, Microsoft and Nortel formed astrategic alliance, which included, among other things, cross-licensed intellectual property. According to Microsoft, that gives them licence to the patents, even if Google or any other company buys them....

Well, we ‘dun goofed.’ Microsoft just confirmed with TNW Microsoft that the purported ‘Windows 8 screenshot’ that we posted earlier was in fact Windows 7. This is slightly embarrassing. How did the picture fool everyone? Because it has text labels turned on for the taskbar, a little used feature, and not one that is very recognizable as a Windows 7 element, and so everyone went into a tizzy assuming that it was Windows 8....