MWC: Microsoft’s Slice of Mobile OS Sector Shrinks

That spokesperson declined to offer the number of applications in the Marketplace as of February, saying, “We don’t release the exact numbers for applications because it changes all the time.” Counted by hand on 9 February, the Windows Marketplace for Mobile website listed 718 mobile applications, in 14 categories, for US-based Mobile 6.x smartphones. A pulldown menu on that website gives access to mobile-application pages for other countries and their native languages, including Italy and Korea; a number of those countries, however, have only a small handful of programs listed, suggesting that the worldwide total of Mobile 6.x applications is not exponentially higher than that of the United States.

By contrast, Apple’s App Store expanded to more than 100,000 apps in 2009, with research firm IDC predicting in a 3 December research note that the storefront will expand to around 300,000 apps by the end of 2010. That note also predicted that Google Android’s apps could expand “by a factor of five or more” over the next 12 months.

Microsoft is planning a major smartphone-related rollout at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress on 15 February; general online consensus seems to be that Microsoft will either introduce a totally new Mobile 7 or a largely revamped version of Mobile 6.5.

Minor updates to Mobile 6.5 are already circulating in the wild, with the 2 February debut of the Sony Ericsson Aspen running Windows Mobile 6.5.3, a version with tweaks including capacitive touch-screen support, a horizontal scroll bar in place of tabs, touch support for legacy applications and a platform for enabling multitouch.

If Microsoft does choose to announce Mobile 7 on 15 February, for a rollout either later in 2010 or early 2011, then questions may arise over the company’s road map for supporting multiple operating systems running on a variety of devices.