Windows Phone Marketplace opens up in 13 more countries

Windows announced on Wednesday that it is expanding the Windows Phone Marketplace to 13 more countries. The new locations include Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Including locations opened this year in Argentina, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, and the Philippines, Windows Phone Marketplace now reaches 54 countries. As announced at MWC 2012, other countries that will be receiving the Marketplace this year include the UAE, Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Israel, Thailand, and Vietnam.

One country that Microsoft is really excited about is China. As we told you today, the Nokia Lumia 610C and Nokia Lumia 800C are both supposed to launch in the country next month and are both designed to work on China Telecom's CDMA based 3G network. According to Microsoft, the Chinese version of the Windows Phone Marketplace has added 20,000 apps in the last three months. At the same time, 15,000 registered developers have been added to the county's total.

If you live in one of the countries that we mentioned above as getting the Marketplace today, visit the sourcelink for directions on how to set up your phone to load apps purchased from the new site. If you have already set up your phone to load up apps from a third party app purveyor, you can follow the instructions on how to reconfigure your phone to the new Marketplace by clicking on this link.

source: Microsoft (1), (2)