News

Handango gets a 10th birthday site revamp

Easier to use, apparently

Handango gets a 10th birthday site revamp
Smartphone content&apps retailer Handango has announced a revamp of its website, to tie in with its tenth anniversary this year.

Yep, the site was founded back in 1999, albeit under the name of PalmCentral. Which is fitting, if you think about it, with Palm having just risen from the  near-dead with its Pre smartphone and webOS platform.

However, nowadays Handango supports the full gamut of smartphones, including Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlackBerry and Android.

The proliferation of handsets on those platforms has brought fragmentation, which is one reason for the site revamp. There's a new device selector tool to make sure users are viewing content and apps that work on their handset, for example, as well as a cleaner look and feel.

"In a fragmented marketplace, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for smartphone users to search and download content," says CEO Bill Stone.

"We know consumers traditionally search for new applications when they first purchase their phones so the new website features couldn't have come at a better time as so many new smartphones hit the market."

Handango is also getting stat-happy to celebrate its birthday. The site has done more than 100 million downloads in its ten years with an average paid order value of more than $20 per app.

It now supports more than 1,000 devices, has global sites in 14 languages and 16 currencies, and offers a catalogue of more than 140,000 apps from more than 23,000 developers and publishers.

Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)