Electronics, Windows Phone 7 | featured news

As AT&T gets ready to launch a new wave of Windows Phones to the pubic, independent analysis of Microsoft's app store reveals more than 80,000 applications have been submitted.

The Windows Phone Marketplace continues to grow at a steady rate. In little over a year, the Marketplace now has over 40,000 published apps according to an estimate from All About Windows Phone. This number is not the total available to consumers, but the total number that has been submitted to the online store. An estimated 5,500 apps are no longer available to consumers because they were removed by Microsoft or the developer.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ubuntu Linux has a shot to be a contending operating system for future phones and tablets. It'll be a tough go -- Apple iOS and Google Android dominate the field now, with new Windows Phone 7 also making a play.

The US Army is near finishing a largely successful test of smartphones on the battlefield. In an interview this week, project director Michael McCarthy told CNN the six-week trials in Fort Bliss, Texas and White Sands, New Mexico were 'encouraging' in gauging the effectiveness of Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone hardware for communicating information in the field. They had also been testing iPads as well as unspecified Dell and HP tablets.

"Mango," the next major update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system, will include several notable enhancements for consumers, including turn-by-turn navigation, built-in barcode scanning, voice-to-text speech input, on-device podcast support and a music identification service similar to the popular mobile application Shazam, but available within Bing. Mango, also known as Windows Phone 7.5, is due out this fall.

If you've held off on buying a fancy new phone this year, you should cop one of these.

The first three US phones running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 OS go on sale today, with the Samsung Focus (4 stars) and HTC Surround (3 stars) debuting on AT&T and the HTC HD7 (3.5 stars) becoming available on T-Mobile. All three phones cost $199 with ...

AT&T demonstrated its support of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) at the software’s official launch on Oct. 11. The carrier will introduce four different WP7 phones before the end of the year, making it Microsoft’s chief launch partner in the U.S.

Garmin is working on a Windows Phone 7 smartphone, could launch late 2010, early 2011. Also working on Google Android smartphone for early 2011