Perhaps users of Windows Phone devices don’t understand that the “marketplace” is where you go to buy apps? For some inexplicable reason, Microsoft is appearing going through the process of rebranding its Windows Phone Marketplace into Windows Phone Store. I guess this is falling in line with what Google did too, shifting from an Android Market to a Google Play Store too.

It’s also possible that this is simply Microsoft’s latest attempt to bring everything under the same over-arching umbrella, which is fundamentally the same thing that they’ve started doing with certain Xbox, Zune and Windows-branded offerings. After all, there is a “Windows Store” that’ll come along with Windows 8… but this is still the Windows Phone Store, so it’s not like the two are intricately intertwined either.

At this point, Microsoft is neither confirming nor denying the name change, but the “Windows Phone Store” naming scheme has started to appear in a few places, like on the Windows Phone Dev Center where it says you can “create great apps and add them to the Windows Phone Store for the world to see, try, and buy.”

[Source]

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No, this number is nowhere near as impressive as what you’d find through the App Store for the Apple iPhone and other iOS devices, but it represents a major milestone for Microsoft’s latest mobile operating system. If you happen to be rocking something like the Samsung Focus or HTC Surround, you can now go to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and find no fewer than 5,000 apps.

Remember that the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has only been open for a little over two months, and the whole WP7 platform is still very much in the early adoption stage. To put things into perspective, Windows Phone 7 only took a little over two months to meet the 5,000 app threshold. On the flip side, Palm’s webOS has been out for a year and a half and it is only now hitting 5,000 apps. That says something right there.

While there are certainly a number of free applications available through the WP7 Marketplace, it’s also noteworthy that the average price of an app got about a ten cent bump to $1.52 last week. The $500 “I Am Rich” app surely had something to do with that.

Of the 5,000 apps, about a fifth are mobile games. That just goes to show you that gaming on smartphones is definitely a big thing, even when it comes to a Microsoft platform. There is Xbox Live on there after all.

[WPCentral]

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