Today, Microsoft made a big announcement on the upcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Like heavily picked up in the news, developers will be able to submit their applications from July 27. The store itself will go live at the end of this year. But the most interesting announcement was the support for older Windows Mobile versions.

Up until now, the Windows Marketplace was said to support the Windows Mobile 6.5 version, also to go to market at the end of this year. This meant that the consumer audience to download and buy would have to built up gradually. All the consumers the existing users of a Windows Mobile phone would not be able to use Marketplace, unless they could upgrade to the newest OS version. So good news, Marketplace will also be available for existing Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 phones.

According Microsoft, this brings the potential user base of Windows Marketplace for Mobile to 30 million consumers, spread over 29 countries. What a difference in reach compared to only supporting the newest OS. Second, there is already a big developer community that offer applications for the current Windows Mobile phones. This offers a big upside getting a wide range of content in the store.

In the announcement, Microsoft also made  an big emphasis on a special section, called Business Center. In this, you can download specific business targeted applications. We don’t see yet how this is really different from the business and utility application categories that a lot of the other stores have.

Vincent Hoogsteder

Tags: Windows Marketplace, windows mobile

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 8:25 pm by Vincent Hoogsteder and is filed under Windows Marketplace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.