14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Phone 7 announces itself to be one of the nicest mobile operating systems Microsoft managed to push to the market. For the mobile space, it might mean a new, appealing option for users, as well as a strong competitor for the continuously growing Android platform from Google. For Microsoft, it could mark the company's comeback on the smartphone market, as the older Windows Mobile platform can't help it maintain its market share in front of its current rivals.
For that to happen, of course, Microsoft would have to lure end-users and developers alike on its side, and it seems that it already made great steps in this direction. Soon after officially announcing the upcoming launch of the operating system, the Redmond-based company announced the release of tools to enable app building for it, namely the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools CTP, and it seems that over 200,000 developers already downloaded them. A new, beta version of the solution was released this week, and Microsoft's Brandon Watson says that a final flavor is set to emerge in the not too far future.
“I wanted to share with the community just how excited the developer community has been. As a data guy, I like numbers because they tend not to lie. Since the Mix10 release in March of the first CTP tools (and then the refresh in April), we have seen over 200K downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools. That was before we shipped a Beta, and certainly before we had 5M devices in market to fuel demand. At some point we’ll release the Beta download numbers, but based on the number of people registered for the live training course next week (hint: it’s got a comma in it), there’s a lot of people who want to build apps for Windows Phone 7,” Brandon Watson notes in a recent blog post.
All in all, this means that the Windows Phone 7 operating system is already appealing to the developing community out there, and that chances are that users would be equally attracted by handsets powered by the OS. Since the development of applications and games for the upcoming platform already kicked off, chances are that the first devices running under it would arrive on shelves accompanied by a wide range of entries in that Windows Phone Marketplace software portal Microsoft is readying.