Microsoft’s first major Windows Phone 7 update received a lot of attention from us and certainly included some useful improvements, but didn’t really feel as substantial of a change as releases like Android 2.2 or iOS 4.0 did in comparison to their predecessors. Mango may end up going a long way to providing some of the new features WP7 users crave, if it delivers on all the expected improvements Microsoft has touched upon. One area that should be getting updated, multi-language support, promises to add 16 new tongues, but it turns out there’s a bit of a hitch that may keep it from being as useful as it could be.

The rumor, popping up on French site MonSmartphone, says that though the operating system will support these 16 new languages post-update, just what your smartphone is capable of will depend on the device’s ROM. For currently-available Windows Phone hardware, that means you wouldn’t gain any new languages even with the update; only new phones shipping with Mango already installed would benefit from the change.

This isn’t to say that manufacturers won’t release their own updates to enable new languages for existing WP7 smartphones, but the Microsoft update alone won’t cut it. If this rumor turns out being true, we’d expect more than a few users to be disappointed.

Source: MonSmartphone (Google translate)

Via: WMPoweruser