Handmark has just announced their own mobile solution for independent developers to quickly create a branded online App Store that allows for maximum sales potential. The announcement does not go into any details about this new offering. Questions that stll need answering:

• Cost to developers.
• Bandwidth and storage capacity available.
• Level of customization
• Level of security

Due to the lack of details presented thus far, it is hard to tell if this online retail solution for Windows Mobile developers can truly deliver an experience that goes above and beyond what developers currently utilize to deploy their own titles online.  Most Windows Mobile developers sell their products directly on their own website or through a third party site like Handango, Clickgamer, PocketGear and others. Technobrains has an affiliate site based on Clickgamer.com located HERE. What this provides Technobrains is a source of added revenue whenever someone purchases a title directly from this affliated website. If you look at the actual URL, it is the original www.clickgamer.com url with the banner image and few key words being replaced to turn their own online website into a branded Technobrains website. This is all controlled by a file stored on the individuals computer called a COOKIE file. This method of branding benefits the original creator mostly since there are no safe guards in place to insure that the purchase is credited to www.clickgamer.com/?b=technobrains and not www.clickgamer.com when a consumer returns later to make the actual purchase directly on www.clickgamer.com. Once the original visiter to www.clickgamer.com/?b=technobrains goes to www.clickgamer.com on another computer or on the same system that has the COOKIE feature disabled, will not see the branded Technobrains version of Clickgamer.

PocketGear has their own App Store HERE which currently has over 2500 Windows Mobile applications available for purchase directly from your Windows Mobile smartphone. Unless Handmark can offer a cost effective, very simple marketing plan and deployment capabilities for independent developers, I cannot see this taking off for the shrinking Windows Mobile market. It will be interesting to see what Handmark actually offers when the complete details are made public.

You can go HERE to read the current details available from Handmark.

Added Note:

This offering is really geared towards carriers that can effectively deliver the servcies direcrtly to the consumer on specific devices. Developers with a few titles available will still deal with Handmark directly to promote their titles. Still not certain how beneficial this will be for the small Windows Mobile developers out there though.