Microsoft has hailed strong developer support for its new Windows Phone 7 (WP7) platform ahead of the key Christmas shopping season. “We’re heading into one of the biggest shopping weeks of the year and we’re on pace to offer roughly 3,000 apps and games by the end of [last] week,” said Microsoft’s Todd Brix (pictured) in an official company blog. The 3,000 milestone means that Microsoft had added around 1,000 new titles to the WP7 Marketplace store since the US launch on 8 November. He added that Microsoft now has 15,000 developers signed up to support WP7, an increase of 80 percent since September. “We know that many Windows Phone developers have gone to great lengths to ensure that their apps and games are in Windows Phone Marketplace [in time for] this holiday season,” said Brix. “Clearly we’re just getting warmed up.”

WP7’s 3,000 apps means the platform’s apps store is still way behind the volumes available from the likes of Apple, which boasts a hundred times as many (300,000 at last count). However, Microsoft has previously indicated it is taking a ‘quality over quantity’ approach to apps in the belief that a vast choice of titles can confuse users.

Brix announced a number of other developments aimed at ramping up marketing efforts behind WP7’s apps and games offerings. This included promotion via the ‘Visual Search’ feature in Microsoft’s Bing search engine, on windowsphone.com and via Zune.  He also noted that “Windows Phone devices, apps and games are now prominent features of the Xbox dashboard that people see on their televisions when they start Xbox and view tabs such as the Spotlight category.” Microsoft announced recently that it had sold more than 1 million of its Wii-style ‘Kinect’ devices for Xbox 360 in the first 10 days of availability, adding to the 45 million Xbox 360 consoles already sold.