14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Phone applications and games are now available for download for users in 13 new markets around the world.
Among the new countries that can now benefit from access to the Marketplace, we can count Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Venezuela.
Earlier this year, the company made its Marketplace available for users in Argentina, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, and the Philippines. The total number of countries that can enjoy access to the app storefront at the moment is 54.
The Redmond-based software giant also announced that more countries would get a taste of the Windows Phone Marketplace soon, including UAE, Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Israel, Thailand, and Vietnam.
For the time being, no specific info on when the storefront will be launched there has emerged, but more details should be offered in the not too distant future.
On March 28th, Nokia launched its first Windows Phones on the market in China, with access to various localized content available through the Marketplace. China is the largest phone market in the world.
“We’re excited about all the new Marketplace locations, but there’s one recent addition worth special mention: China,” Microsoft’s Mazhar Mohammed notes in a blog post.
“Maybe you saw the news today about the Nokia Lumia phones coming to China Telecom. In less than three months, we’ve added 20,000 apps and 15,000 registered developers to our new China Marketplace.”
Windows Phone users in any of the aforementioned countries should find it easy to set up their handsets for access to the local Marketplace.
“Note that for technical reasons it might take a few days before Marketplace is visible on everyone’s phones in the new countries—and look for the web versions of the new stores sometime next week,” Microsoft notes.
Those who will have to change Marketplace locations will need to reset their devices. This will erase all apps, contacts and other personal files on the device.
This means that users will have to back up their phones before proceeding, so that no important information is lost during the process. They can sync these files either into the cloud, or to a PC using Zune.
“As the head of the engineering team responsible for our online store, I can tell you that we’re working on lots of great stuff, which I look forward to telling you about in the months ahead,” Mazhar Mohammed concludes.