Microsoft looks to be starting the year with an update to its Windows Phone 7 system and to the app market, it’s also announced that the Windows Phone 7 marketplace is adding 100 new apps a day.
Plans to enhance Windows Phone 7 were confirmed by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer at the Microsoft keynote at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he announced that the company is looking to address issues that consumers and reviewers have highlighted.
Chief among these are said to be plans to add the ability to highlight, copy, and paste text from within any application, improved memory management that will dramatically reduce the time it takes an app to load, and vastly improved search functionality in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Ballmer also said that the Windows Marketplace for Mobile now has 5,500 apps, and it’s increasing by 100 apps a day.
If it continues at 100 apps a day, and we doubt that it will, that means it’ll have around just over 35,000 apps by the time it’s a year old, which is pitiful. We suspect that many developers have been waiting to see how the OS takes off with the public before committing further, and so far it’s just not happening. If sales had been good then you can bet that Ballmer would have told us as part of his keynote, and he would have been very loud about it, the fact that sales weren’t mentioned speaks volumes for the OS.
The one redeeming statistic that Ballmer announced was that over 50% of the visitors are downloading a new app each day, which gives hope that the users are happy to experiment but it’s still not the sort of message that they wanted to be able to shout about at the keynote of the World’s biggest consumer electronics show.
The full video and transcript can be seen and read here
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