Want to run apps that are not officially approved by Microsoft on your Windows Phone 7 device? You might think that you would need some program developed by illegal hacking techniques to accomplish this feat. But now all you need is to pay up some money to download and use the new ChevronWP7 Labs application at its official web site.
For the price of $9 you can get the new app (in 32-bit and 64-bit versions) which the ChevronWP7 team developed with the full approval and even some help from Microsoft itself. Although any Windows Phone 7 smartphone owners can use this app, the ChevronWP7 team created mainly to assist homebrew app developers to create, test and debug programs that are currently unapproved and unsigned for the Windows Phone 7 marketplace.
Since the ChevronWP7 team released the Windows Phone 7 app on Friday it has run into some issues. The team took the program offline temporarily to fix some problems. The app was made available early this morning but apparently there are some more problems, this time with the payment section of the site, that have required the temporary closing of the payment action "until we resolve some service issues".
With new Windows Phone 7.5 devices from HTC and Samsung due to be released next week here in the US, there"s going to be a bigger market for Windows Phone apps and this kind of tool will certainly be helpful for app creators to test out their programs before they submit them to the Windows Phone Marketplace for their official release.
Update: It looks like everything is back online once again. People who downloaded the older client are now asked to download a new version from the site.