It’s another mobile first inside the world’s most populous country. On Wednesday, China Telecom and Nokia formally introduced the Nokia 800C, the first CDMA Windows Phone in China and Nokia’s first Lumia phone for the world’s largest smartphone market.

The Nokia 800C combines head-turning design and the fastest way to connect to the people, places and things that matter most, in an experience uniquely tailored for people in China on the country’s leading 3G network.

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With education at the heart of mobile app development, Microsoft is hoping the developers of tomorrow will educate themselves today on how to build superior applications for the Windows Phone operating system.

To that end, the software giant is teaming with Nokia for AppCampus, a $24 million program that the partners hope will kickstart app development for the platform.

According to the details surfacing Monday, Microsoft and Nokia will both invest approximately $12 million in the AppCampus program, which is expected to launch in May.

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Word broke early Tuesday that Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile handset maker in terms of unit shipments, is shuttering its mobile financial services business.

The closure will reportedly include a freshly launched Nokia Money service in India.

The reason given for the exodus, which won’t be immediate, is a renewed commitment by Nokia to focus on core-business aspects of its operation.

“It’s not going to happen overnight and consumers already using the service are not at risk,” a company spokesman tells Dow Jones Newswires.

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On Monday, word quickly spread that Nokia is planning to shut down its Ovi Share media sharing site. The closure, as of this writing, is planned for late May.

The reasoning for the closure is being pinned on a business decision that will reportedly allow the embattled device maker to dedicate more energy and resources to other aspects of its operation and associated offerings.

“The new business unit Location & Commerce, established in June 2011, is now in the center of our revised services strategy,” the company says, “bringing you leading location-based services like Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps and Nokia Transport.”

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Windows phone apps have a long way to go in order to catch up to iOS and Android apps in terms of their numbers and general popularity.

Despite trailing its competitors, the Windows Phone platform is still growing. In December of 2011, for example, the platform grew by a daily average of 265 apps. By January 2012 this number grew to an average of 400 apps per day.

As of this writing, the Marketplace has more than 55,000 apps.

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Mobile publishing and marketing provider Netbiscuits today published its latest Mobile Metrics Report in which it details the continued problem of mass fragmentation with smartphones, in addition to the lack of HTML5 adoption despite the recent hype.

The company says it processes more than 8.5 billion mobile pages and content items through its platform each month, and said that between November of 2009 and May of 2011, they averaged 2,872 unique devices requesting mobile sites through its platform.  Of these devices, a total of 10 operating system were analyzed including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Bada, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, WebOS, PalmOS and MeeGo.  Though Android and iOS hold the lion’s share, fragmentation is still a major issue, especially in terms of developing mobile applications for specific platforms.

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In its latest report, mobile analytics firm Distimo details the localization of mobile apps and mobile app stores to try and find the percentage of apps that are only popular in one specific country or region, as well as those that are popular on a global level.

The report shows that 27% of the most popular apps in Apple’s App Store for iPhone are only popular in one specific country.  Meanwhile, Nokia’s Ovi Store has the highest proportion of apps published in just one country (29.4%) while the App Store for iPad has the lowest (3.4%).

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