With Marketplace for Mobile on Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft will be giving developers an option to offer a trial on their software. Presumably this means that the app will expire after X uses or X period of time. This is huge. Why? No other smartphone app marketplace can do this. Most of the time there is a free version AND a full version. The problem with this model is that the free versions often lack the full richness of the main application, thus giving the user a “half” experience. My guess is that most users never upgrade to the full application after downloading and using the free version.

With the Trial feature, users can experience the full-fledged experience that the developer intended. From the developer’s perspective, this will cause an increase in sales for their apps, and for users, this will expose them to more premium apps that they would normally stay away from because of off-putting prices.