Windows Marketplace launching with 600 apps

So Microsoft France's product manager for Windows Mobile, Audrey Zolghadr, is saying that the company's upcoming Windows Marketplace launch will be accompanied by around 600 apps certified and available on day one. Depending on your perspective, that's either ridiculously anemic -- the iPhone's App Store has a couple orders of magnitude more currently available, for example -- or a veritable cornucopia. Though the Ovi Store has no shortage of "items" to buy, an overwhelming majority of those are currently wallpapers, ringtones, and the like, and Palm's App Catalog launched with so few apps that many folks (we're not naming names) literally had every app installed within a few minutes of buying the phone. At the end of the day, it's all about signal-to-noise ratio; if Microsoft can deliver 600 apps and half of those are terrific, they're on the right track -- though at this point, we're thinking the next battle in Smartphone Platform Wars doesn't really kick off until WinMo 7 swings by anyway.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/28/w...-bazillion-ti/