Research In Motion (RIM), maker of the popular BlackBerry smartphone, has opened up its own application store for most BlackBerry devices. The new portal is dubbed the BlackBerry App World.
Applications cover categories such as entertainment, games, news, weather, travel, and others will be included in the store. Even though third-party applications have been widely available for the BlackBerry platform for some time now, this is the first that they'll be available in one centralized location. RIM will keep 20 percent of revenue from all software sold through its store, which contrasts with Apple's 30 percent commission on the iPhone App store.
The new app service is available to phone owners as a free download from the official RIM web site, and has around 1,000 applications currently available. Owners interested in using the app store must have a PayPal account and use a BlackBerry smartphone that has either a touch screen or trackball.
RIM is reportedly trying to work with mobile phone carriers in the United States so that customers who make purchases through the app store can have the charges added to their phone bill each month rather than forcing them to use PayPal.
RIM has closely watched the success of the Apple iPhone App Store, which gives iPhone owners the ability to pay for thousands of different applications. The iPhone App Store has proven to be a very popular and profitable service for Apple. It will certainly be interesting to see how RIM does with its own app store clone.
