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Windows Phone Wednesday; Over 15,000 apps and Marketplace failures

Windows Phone 7 continues to do well in the software department with over 15,000 apps now in the Marketplace. There has been lots of WP7 news lately and it is an exciting time to be a WP7 user.
Written by Matthew Miller, Contributing Writer

It has been a couple of weeks since my last Windows Phone Wednesday, but lots of things continue to happen with this platform. We have been seeing FCC revelations that the HTC Trophy is coming to Verizon Wireless shortly and that is great news. We also heard of some upcoming Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) features and can't wait to upgrade. I was also invited to the WP 7.5 preview event, but it is in New York so I will just have to try to meet with the Microsoft team here in Washington State.

Mary Jo also reported on a couple of Windows Phone 7 service failures and it appears they continue as the store hasn't updated since sometime yesterday so neither of the deals mentioned in this post can actually be found yet. Harvest appears as the DoTW, but the price is still shown as $6.99 so do not buy it yet and wait for Microsoft to fix their store.

I was reporting app counts from Marketplace Browser, but one of my astute reader, Sreenu, mentioned that most sites count apps that have been deleted from the Windows Marketplace so I tried to find a place giving me a bit more accurate count. The WP7 App Explorer site states that as of yesterday there were 15,047 apps so the 15,000 application threshold has been reached and continue to roll.

Enigmo was the featured Xbox LIVE game last week and was a game I enjoyed on my Dell Axim X51v back in the day. This week takes me back to my youth again and came out when I was just 10 years old in 1979. Lunar Lander was a classic that is now available for $2.99. It's too bad there is not another modern Xbox LIVE game this week though as I personally like when Microsoft releases a modern title along with these classics. There are likely not as many of us old time gamers out there wanting to play these type of games on their WP7 device as there are modern gamers.

According to my buddies over at WPCentral the Deal of the Week (DotW) is Harvest which is on sale for $4.99 instead of the normal $6.99 price. I played the demo and the game is pretty amazing, but now that I can save a couple bucks I think I will actually go buy it once the Marketplace is fixed.

There are a number of Twitter apps available in the Windows Marketplace and this week I switched from the official Twitter app back to Birdsong as my primary app. I will have to go update my WP7 Twitter app table as there are a large number of Twitter apps available and more are finally adding notifications and Tile support. My top right now is Birdsong, followed by Rowi, moTweets Pro, Beezz, Seesmic, and then Twitter. What is your favorite Twitter app(s) on WP7?

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