MWC 2011 Microsoft is to bring Internet Explorer 9 to Windows Phone 7, though it failed to say exactly when this and a number of other updates will be coming to the smartphone platform.

One update will definitely come in March, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona today. He also pointed to another "significant release" that's coming later in the year - in "the second half of 2011", according to a picture caption on the MS website.

Mango: coming H2 2011

Microsoft first promised to bring copy and paste functionality to WinPho 7 "via the first major update, coming in the next month".

In addition to IE 9, it also said full Twitter integration into the People Hub, support for cloud-stored Office documents - using MS' SkyDrive service - and "a new wave of multitasking applications" will be arriving on the platform later this year.

These latter features won't be part of the March update, but rather that later, H2 release, which insiders have hinted is codenamed 'Mango'. Most likely it'll arrive a year on from WinPho 7's debut in October 2010.

The wording suggests Mango will be WinPho 7 2.0. ®