Microsoft slates 'Mango' VIP unveiling for May 24 in New York

Microsoft officials have demonstrated the upcoming "Mango" Windows Phone update a number of times in recent months. But the official VIP unveiling for press and analysts is May 24 in New York.

Microsoft execs said at the Mix'11 conference in April that Microsoft would be delivering the free Mango developer tools some time in the month of May. I asked a spokesperson if May 24 is the day when the Mango software development kit will hit and was told, "We’ll have more to share on the 24th."

Microsoft used the Mix stage to unveil some of the coming developer features of Mango. At that time, officials noted that they were not yet discussing some of the consumer enhancements for the platform.  Since then, a few tidbits about some of those features have leaked, including the planned availability of beta/private marketplace application access, as well as the rumored inclusion of the Bing Video and Audio search functionality. (As a Microsoft spokesperson noted when I asked today, Bing Vision already is available on iPhone, but Bing Audio is not available on other platforms.)

Mango, which may be called Windows Phone 7.5,  is expected to be released to Microsoft partners in late summer or early fall, and to be available on new Windows Phones in time for a holiday 2011 release. Microsoft also is expected to push the Mango update to existing phone users before the end of this year. Mango is slated to include an HTML5-compliant IE 9 Mobile browser; third-party application multitasking; Twitter integration; and Windows Live Messenger integration, among other features.