New countries supported by Mango Windows Phone Update

MIX 2011 Day 2 Keynote presented by Joe Belfiore and others was full of information about the upcoming Windows Phone update, codenamed Mango. For me, the most important piece of information was the list of the new countries supported by this much anticipated release, planned for autumn 2011. Or, to be precise, not the list, but map… in fact several maps… shown for a few short seconds.

I haven’t found the complete list anywhere, so I’ve decided to put together my own from the keynote screenshots. I think it is going to be useful for a lot of us, underprivileged people from the rest of the world. 🙂

You can click on screenshots to see their fullscreen versions.

New languages

This asian calligraphy is so beautiful, isn’t it?

New languages come here – sorry, I won’t try to identify all the languages, but you can try to find your own. I was happy – there is a Czech “Hello World” – “Ahoj světe”. The interesting point is that the slide shows 14 languages, but claims 16 in the title, so there are two missing. The rest of the world can still hope!

You can also see the time when this keynote section begins – at cca 17:30.

Coutries able to sell their apps

One not widely known fact about WP7 is that there are two marketplace countries lists – for selling and buying. They are very different today and the number of countries able to sell apps is much higher than the number of countries able to buy apps. This will somewhat change with Mango and the buying list will grow more, so the difference between the two lists will diminish.

One more important thing to note is that we are talking about buying and selling apps only. Music and other content availability is and will remain much more limited, because of the distribution rights.

This map shows the countries where developers can register in the Marketplace. The current countries are green, the new are yellow.

The list will grow from 30 to 38, which is quite small improvement to be honest, and surely a disappointment.

Let’s try to name new countries:

• Chile
• China
• Colombia
• Czech Republic
• Hungary
• India
• South Africa
• South Korea

Please correct my mistakes if you find any.

It is expected that the marketplace registration in these yellow countries will be opened during summer 2011. Developers from the white countries must use services of publishers. There are several publishers now, but as far as I know the only one officially supported by Microsoft is Dubai-based Yalla Apps. (I plan to write a little bit about them later.)

Countries able to buy apps

This list grew much more, from 16 to 35. Joe Belfiore showed two maps – before and after the Mango launch – both in green.

Before:

After:

The happy countries:

• Brazil
• Chile
• Colombia
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Finland
• Greece
• Hungary
• India
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Russia
• South Africa
• South Korea
• Sweden
• Taiwan

The interesting thing is that I have found 20 new green countries on the second map, not 19, as the slide title says, so take this with a grain of salt. Or are you able to find a mistake in my list?

For developers this is good news – a great expansion of the market for their apps, although China is strangely missing. Still, India, Brazil, Russia, Japan etc. are welcome additions.

We Love Windows Phone

Nice video made by Brandon Foy: