Tech QQ

With the Windows Phone Marketplace now closing in on 5000 apps, it’s quite hard to get an overview of it from the Marketplace within the phone. Enter Bing Visual Search.

One of the categories in the Bing Visual Search is Windows Phone 7 Apps. Here you can twist and bend the results, look at most downloaded, newest paid, newest free and top ranked. Add to this that you can filter it all by categories and subcategories, price and publisher. Basically an invaluable tool in your search for apps for the Windows Phone 7 device you got this Christmas! (Only beef I got with it is that it is only showing the top 3000 Apps for some strange reason, but since filtering apps rarely give a result set larger than 3000 – what do they really mean?)

There is however a small issue you might run into when you want to try this out – namely it won’t work at all. The problem is it’s not supposed to work for a great many countries Microsoft thinks. So if you live in a country where you’re not allowed to search the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, you have to pretend you live some where else. Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to Bing.com and click your country in the right hand upper corner.

2. Change your location to “USA – English”.

3. Now you’ll get(hopefully) a new header in the upper left hand corner saying “Explore”.

4. Pressing the Explore link will give you access to a lot of new toys, but click the one saying “Visual Search”.

5. After accessing the Visual Search just press the “Featured Galleries” tab just below the search row, at the end of those featured galleries you will find the link to the Windows Phone 7 Apps.

Now search and play around, find some nice looking apps and support some of the hard working developers.

Happy app hunting!