Microsoft and Nokia Finally Sign Definitive Agreement

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft and Nokia yesterday announced the signing of a definitive agreement regarding their global mobile ecosystem partnership. We already know that Microsoft and Nokia will work together to reach out to developers, but the two have agreed to make Windows Phone developer registration free for all Nokia developers. There are also plans to open a new Nokia-branded global application store that leverages the Windows Phone Marketplace infrastructure so that developers can publish and distribute applications through a single developer portal to consumers that use Windows Phone, Symbian, and Series 40 devices. Lastly, Nokia will contribute its expertise in operator billing to ensure participants in the Windows Phone ecosystem can take advantage of Nokia's billing agreements with 112 operators in 36 markets."

Shame

[Anonymous Cowar]

I switched from the n900 to the motorola atrix and I'm going to say it: for a linux geek who doesn't care about an app market, the n900 (and its successor) beat the pants off of android devices. I would routinely go 3-4 days without charging vs my 36 hour android battery life, the slide out keyboard was pretty good and beats the on-screen keyboards any day, and multitasking without having applications hide in the background is still sorely missed.

Now the n900 wasn't perfect, but if it had a capacitive screen, 3g on AT&T, and a 1ghz+ chip, it would have been.

Re:Who are they reaching out to?

[recoiledsnake]

>Windows developers that were already ignoring WP7

Really? How did you come to know of that? By reading Slashdot?

The developer tools were downloaded over 1.5 million times and there are over 13,000 apps in the WP7 marketplace (faster growth rate than Android and iPhone at that stage).

Re:Who are they reaching out to?

[FlipperPA]

Hardly a Microsoft fan, but two seconds of Googling would have gotten you here (or any number of other sources):

http://www.windowsphoneapplist.com/stats/ [windowsphoneapplist.com]

Re:Who are they reaching out to?

[UnknowingFool]

It's not that much faster than iOS. WP7 has almost 15K apps right now. The marketplace was launched Oct 21, 2010. That's about 81/day. iTunes App store launched July 11, 2008 and had 15K by January 16, 2009. That is 78/day. There is lot of rounding error in there as the numbers are not exact. Android is a little harder to figure out as it's not all in one place.