Authors: Mike Halsey (MVP)

Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips

Two big pieces of news have emerged about Windows Phone this weekend.  The first of which is that the Windows Phone Marketplace has reached 40,000 apps, which is a big improvement on over 35,000 apps just one months ago and 30,000 back in August.  The reports say that 165 new apps are being added every day of which about 15% are games and 68% a free.

This still leaves Windows Phone massively behind the iPhone, which has admittedly had a considerable head start, with half a million apps available and the Android store with 300,000 available.  The research is keen to point out though that at the end of its first year the Android store had only 20,000 apps available.

At the time of writing, 40,189 items have been published. Of these, 10,882 were added in the last 90 days and 4,770 were added in the last 30 days. These items come from 10,731 different publishers.

In the study, done by allaboutwindowsphone, it is predicted that the app store will hit 50,000 apps in the middle or January 2012.  They also detail the types of apps that are being written for the platform.  Of the largest books and reference take the joint top spot with games, both on 15% with tools and productivity in second place with 14% and entertainment following up with 13% in third place.

In other news it has emerged that computing giant Dell has replaced 15,000 staff Blackberry handsets with Windows Phones which is about 50% of the total number of phones within the company.  If you want to ask which Windows Phone the company has adopted you’ll be unsurprised to hear they’ve opted for their own Venue Pro handset which was launched last year.

RIM have referred to the move away from Blackberrys at Dell a “Publicity stunt” implying that Dell were only doing this to help advertise their own smartphone, the only one made by the company so far.

The Venue Pro is indeed an intriguing Windows Phone with a slide-down keyboard and is currently the only Windows Phone of its type, with the HTC 7 Pro having a keyboard that slides out sideways and is hampered by too many user interface pages in Windows Phone that refuse to rotate.

Does this mean that Windows Phone is winning or that it’s just doing less badly than it was before?  In truth the news that major corporations such as Dell, which obviously has a price advantage using its own handset, trust the new enterprise features and improvements that have come with the recent Mango update, something I have written an article for Microsoft UK about that will be published this week.

The acid test will be if any other companies indicate that they’re interested in following suit.  Microsoft has caused considerable harm to its smartphone reputation by effectively shunning companies that were loyal to their old and ageing Windows Mobile platform.  This platform might have been awful to use but systems administrators loved it’s integration with Exchange server, the ability to use group policy controls and the remote management that the platform offered.  Windows Phone still has almost none of these, nor does it have direct sync with Outlook for small to medium-sized businesses who may have been using Windows Mobile for years with pop accounts rather than Microsoft’s Exchange system.

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