Hasta La Gadget!

Not that it’s a competition, or anything, by Microsoft just wants to let you that it hit its 5000th Windows Phone 7 app this week, eight days after announcing that the company had shipped 1.5 million devices running the mobile operating system (that’s shipped, not sold).

That’s the same number of apps that Palm/HP has in the webOS app store (Microsoft launched its store two months ago–Palm’s store has been around eight months) and one-third of what the BlackBerry store is carrying.

Of course, Microsoft is still far behind the industry leaders–Apple and Google have 300,000 and 200,000 apps, respectively, but the numbers are still promising for a company that was largely considered out of the game, just a few months back.