Samsung’s new app store (no one can do without one these days!) will be operated by Handmark and is set to go live on 14 September (2009, that is), I read. The respective site is (sort of) live and appears to accept registrations of prospective vendors. Go here if you feel like it… Launch will be in the UK, France and Italy first. No word when the others follow.

According to the press release, the content available will consist of Windows Mobile and Symbian s60 titles and will be available on the Omnia, I8910HD, Omnia II and Omnia Lite (so a true omni-store then). Billing is available via both credit cards and operator billing, which is – on the face of it – good (i.e. plain and simple credit card-billing doesn’t often work; Apple’s app store is an exception, I’d say, because input is via iTunes with which people are already familiar).

I’ll spare you the rest of the lyrical odes to the various partners… But let’s try and break this down: how big will this thing then be? Samsung is a force in mobile and its Omnia phones have had some very significant success indeed: in some markets (Germany was one), the Omnia outsold the iPhone by some margin (in December 2008, the Omnia had a 14.9% share of the German smartphone market compared to the iPhone 3G with 7.6%). It also launches in India now. I could not get my hands on solid sales numbers though (in the top 10 list by accessory sales for June, the Omnia came in on #10)… However, anecdotally, it is behind Nokia, RIM and Apple in global smartphone market share. So if we say that, on a global basis, there will be about the same number of devices around, that would make the phones a good success for Samsung.

However, when it comes to usage, I am not sure if the Omnia can compete with the iPhone. If we take ad impressions as an indicator (and it really is just that), we’ve seen that the iPhone’s 8% market share translates into 40% ad impressions. And because a lot of apps (and web “apps”) use ads, I think it is probably safe to assume that usage is higher. And this is arguably the crux of app successes: they need to be available but they also need to be discoverable and usable, and all of this with a lot of ease. Will they succeed? I hope so as it would do a ton of good to the industry would there be more than the niche player Apple. Their new TouchWiz SDK (see here) should help ease development for better UI, and the features of the store they announced look decent so far, so let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Image credit: GSM Arena