BlackBerry App World: solid, not sensational

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

App World for BlackBerry users doesn’t have the polish of the App Store for iPhone, but it has promise and potential to make an extremely popular smartphone even more useful.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion launched its one-stop, phone-based store Wednesday. It isn’t as intuitive, easy or fun to use as Apple’s App Store. But BlackBerry users — ranging from college students to the suit-wearing business class — expect solid performance, not pizzazz from their equipment. And that’s what they’ll get with App World.

App stores — virtual marketplaces for downloading applications, or programs, onto a phone directly — are becoming a knockoff trend in the same way that touchscreens did when the iPhone came out nearly two years ago. Apple started its App Store last summer, and since then, RIM, Nokia, Google, Palm and Microsoft have either started or announced similar efforts. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

The iPhone’s App Store is an icon easily visible on the phone’s screen, needing only one-touch access to get to the store. BlackBerry owners download App World via computer or by using their phones’ Web browser, going to BlackBerry.com.

If you use the phone download, the process moves pretty quickly, a matter of seconds, depending on the model of BlackBerry and the cellular network you’re on. I used one of RIM’s newer models, the BlackBerry Curve 8900, and took advantage of the device’s built-in wireless capability for a speedy download.

Check BlackBerry operating system
First, though, make sure your BlackBerry is App World-qualified. The device needs to be running BlackBerry’s Operating System 4.2 or higher, and also must have either a trackball or make use of the “SurePress” virtual keyboard on the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm,

It’s up to the user to move the App World icon out of the BlackBerry’s Downloads folder to a more visible location, such as the home screen. If you don’t, you’ll wind up taking an extra step every time you want to get to App World.

There’s no flourish when you open App World, no “Ta-da!” “Wow!” or “Awesome!” App World organization is uncluttered (and some might say unimaginative).

Click on its icon, and more than a dozen “featured items,” from Facebook to AOL Instant Messenger, are glimpse-sible on what RIM calls a “Front Page Carousel.”

Icons for categories, top downloads, search and “My World” — where a user’s App World programs are kept — are shown beneath the carousel at the bottom of the screen.

Within categories, for example, in BlackBerry-like fashion, there’s a comprehensive and legible list: Entertainment, Games, Maps & Navigation, Music & Video, News & Weather, Personal Finance & Banking, Personal Health & Wellness, Productivity & Utilities, Professional & Business, Reference & eBooks, Social Networking & Sharing, Sports & Recreation, Travel.

Click on Productivity & Utilities, for example, and another list of sub-categories comes up: Clocks, Calculators & Utilities, Document Management, On-the-Go Productivity and Personal Organization.

Program descriptions are short; perhaps too short, with many only having a few sentences. That may not be enough information to help someone decide whether to buy.

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