Android Marketplace

App Store and Google’s Android Market, Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace has been posting some decent growth lately. In mid-November, it hit the 40,000 app milestone, and now, a little over a month later, it’s hit another.

Windows Phone app submissions, the Marketplace has seen more than 50,000 apps published to it — 50,126, to be exact.

Notably, Windows Phone reached that 50,000 app milestone in 14 months, faster than Android, Symbian, or BlackBerry (but slower than iOS, which hit that mark in about a year).

Clearly, the platform is picking up steam. While it took a little over a year to reach 40,000 apps, it took just 40 days to accumulate the next 10,000.

That bodes well for Windows Phone in 2012. Of course, it needs to drive that growth higher still, if it ever hopes to match its rivals in the space. Though a noteworthy milestone, 50,000 apps is still a paucity, compared to the App Store’s 600,000 and Android Market’s 500,000.

Free Download HTC HD7 Software

For our full thoughts on Windows Phone 7, you'd better head on over to our exhaustive (but hopefully not exhausting) review or check out the video below -- both are awesome. We'll limit ourselves to discussing HTC's Hub additions here briefly. The first thing to note is that HTC adorns the bootup sequence for its Hub with an outrageously extravagant and almost instantly annoying animation that pummels you with oncoming cloud and sun symbols to remind you that yes, there's a weather app coming up in there. Once you get inside, you're faced with a stock updater, that climate-monitoring utility we just mentioned, and some other tidbits like Notes and a Photo Enhancer. HTC promises it'll keep adding more functionality as things go along and we've got no reason to doubt that. For now, we couldn't care less about stocks or the weather, so we decided to play with the other two apps.

Notes is a quirky, stylized take on your usual note-recording app. It gives you a board that you can "pin" little post-its to, which in turn age relative to their, erm, age. We could frankly take it or leave it, there's a character limit on each note so if you're a wordy sort of missive writer, it'll immediately discourage use, while its stylized elements feel somewhat forced and unnecessary. It's cute, and maybe some weird demographic that appreciates animated transitions more than rapid and easy data input will appreciate it more, but it wasn't for us.

Now the Photo Enhancer, that was another story. This image post-processing app doesn't really have any pretensions for the high office of actually enhancing your photos. Oh, sure enough, it has one preset for auto-correcting and enhancing your pics, but it's real title might be something closer to Photo Fiddler. It comes with a bunch of different after-effects you can apply to generate particular artistic conceits atop your images -- from making them look like monochromatic classic, to intentionally over-exposing them, to giving them warm or cold color casts. Honestly, it was a lot more fun than we expected it to be and its basic but varied functionality seems a perfect fit for the device it's riding on. Top marks.

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