After months of waiting and uncertainty, AT&T has finally provided hard information on its upcoming flagship Windows Phone, the Nokia Lumia 900.  The phone will launch April 8, 2012, for $99 on contract.

At launch, the Lumia 900 will be available in black or cyan; later in the month, a white version will also be available.

The Lumia 900 is the second Nokia Windows Phone released in the U.S. – the mid-range Lumia 710 hit T-Mobile earlier this year.

Features of the Lumia 900 include a 1.4GHz Snapdragon single-core processor, 16GB of onboard flash storage, a 4.3-inch AM-OLED touchscreen, an 8MP Carl Zeiss primary camera, a front-facing camera, and support for AT&T’s still-new LTE high speed data network.

The full press release is available after the jump.

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With a smartphone market awash in dual core processors, and with quad-core processors now beginning to make an appearance, Windows Phone fans have been asking for some time why their favorite handsets have been relegated to single-coredom.  Even the latest round of Windows Phones such as the upcoming Nokia Lumia 900, impressive though they may be in many respects, are single-core SoC affairs. 

But there are signs that is about to change. The latest glimmer of hope?  Speaking at MWC, Rob Chandhok, a Qualcomm Senior VP, said “"It’s not for me to announce when S4 is coming to Windows Phone – I’ll leave that to the OEMs – but there’s no structural problem between then and now."

If Qualcomm is working on bringing high-end, modern SoCs to Windows Phone, you can bet other chipmakers are, too.  But we’ll likely have to late until late 2012 – or longer – for dual core Windows Phones to become a reality; Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango,” the latest version of the OS, doesn’t support multi-core processors.  This restriction will be lifted in Windows Phone 8, due out sometime between late 2012 and whenever Microsoft gets around to it.

Sometime this year, AT&T will add another HTC Windows Phone 7 handset to its lineup, the HTC Titan. 

As its name suggests, the Titan is a big fella, boasting a 4.7-inch screen – but even with this large display, the Titan is quite thin at just under 9.9mm (0.38 inches).  Features include a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, 16GB of flash memory, 512MB of RAM, HSPA+ “4G”, and the as-yet unreleased Windows Phone 7.5 OS, aka Mango. 

No pricing or release date information has been made available, though the HTC Titan will ship sometime in Q4 2011, likely October.

AT&T will also release two new Samsung Windows Phones in Q4: the Samsung Focus S and the Focus Flash.

Check back for more HTC Titan and Windows Phone news.

Source: AT&T

Android has voice interaction throughout the OS.  iOS 5 will also feature updated voice commands.  But Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango,” the upcoming version of Microsoft’s smartphone operating system may have them both beat… if it actually works.

According to a new post at the Windows Phone Blog, Windows Phone 7.5 will feature advanced voice-based prompts and interaction. 

Here’s an example from the post:

WP: [music pauses]You have a text message from Cody Pardi. You can say read it or ignore.
Me: Read it.
WP: “When will you be home?” You can say reply, call or I’m done.
Me: Reply.
WP: Say your message.
Me: “In about 20 minutes.”
WP: [The phone transcribes and repeats the message] You can say send, try again, or I’m done.
Me: Send. [music resumes]

Check out the PocketNow video below to find out exactly what this speech interface can and can’t do for you once it hits devices later this year.

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The first major update for the Windows Phone 7 OS, known as Mango, has just been approved for RTM.  RTM stands for Release to Manufacturing, which means the base of the upcoming version of Microsoft’s mobile operating system is now complete.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll be seeing a Mango update for your Windows Phone any time soon; handset manufacturers like HTC and Samsung, along with carriers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in the United States, will now have to tailor the base OS for specific Windows Phone handsets, which can take some time to complete.  Also, carriers have an annoying amount of say-so when it comes to WP7 update releases, which could lead to further delays.

We have no timeframe for Mango’s release other than “this fall,” which could technically come as late as mid-December.  But it’s more likely that updates to Mango will come in October or November, though Microsoft is no stranger to product delays.

Windows Phone 7 “Mango” will include Internet Explorer 9 with HTML5 support, threaded email, text and IM, third-party app multitasking and more.  If you’re curious about Mango, head to Engadget for a detailed preview they posted in June.