Posted 03/15/10 at 04:23:08 PM by Bart Salisbury

Can’t have a smartphone OS these days without a companion app store, and Windows Phone 7 is no different. There’s no date for the opening of Windows Phone Marketplace, still Microsoft has been busy rounding up partners with wares to sell once it does.

On the list are Fandango, Sling Media, AP, Foursquare, Shazam, and Pandora. And they’ll present their apps in a Marketplace designed to sell: “The Marketplace features a panoramic design and active merchandising to increase the discoverability of games and applications, and supports one-time credit card purchases, mobile operator billing and advertising-funded applications.” A nice feature: customers will get to try before they buy.

With Windows Phone 7 due for release “holiday 2010”, it’s a reasonable bet the Windows Phone Marketplace will make an appearance about that same time.

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Posted 03/11/09 at 05:42:43 PM by Pulkit Chandna

The Windows Mobile marketplace was one of Microsoft’s major announcements at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It has been conveniently presumed that the online marketplace for Windows Mobile will be an application itself. But now that the Windows Mobile marketplace website is online, it is possible that the online application store may turn out to be a mobile-formatted website.

This conjecture has been spawned by the new Windows Mobile marketplace website, which greets users with a mobile-formatted “coming soon” message. It also must be noted that distributing apps through a mobile-formatted website will make it easier for Microsoft to make the marketplace available on both Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Mobile 6.1. But such a web-based app store will have its limitations. Though it is plausible, it’s merely a conjecture.

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Posted 01/18/08 at 12:50:54 PM by Michael Brown

Microsoft, seeing the futility in polishing turds, went back to the drawing board to design the second rev of the Zune. (If only they’d do the same for Vista!) Fortunately for early adopters, many of the new features and desktop software will be made available for the first-gen Zune via a firmware update.

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