RIM -finally- launches App World for ANZoids

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 14 December 2009 06:44

Opinion and Analysis

RIM has finally launched an app store for Australian and New Zealand BlackBerry users, opening up a world of capability extending business, reference and utility apps alongside fun time-wasters like horoscopes and games, but while paid apps are available to US users, ANZ'ers are only getting free ones, for now.

Although mobile apps have been around for years before the iPhone on various smartphone platforms and PDAs, most notably the Palm software explosion of the mid to late 90s, it's the iPhone and its App Store that have captured the imagination of developers and the public in the "noughties".

BlackBerry's App World has been available in the US, UK, Europe and Canada for months, with other countries in Central and South America added, and then India, a little later in South Africa and now Australia and NZ at 2pm AEDST on Friday December 11, continuing the progressive rollout across the world.

It's something Apple did too during the roll out of iTunes store availability in different countries, but by the time the iPhone App Store rolled out with iPhone OS 2.0, Apple was much more organised in getting plenty of countries online quickly.

A quick look at the online version of BlackBerry App World shows US users get access to paid apps, with a total of 3903 apps available (quickly calculated by adding up the numbers beside each category), so while we in Aust and NZ won't yet get access to them all, a select number of free apps is being made available, which can be downloaded via 2G and 3G mobile phone networks or thankfully, for those BlackBerries that have it, via Wi-Fi.

Some of those existing popular BlackBerry apps we can now download include the BlackBerry Messenger, Bloomberg Mobile, Daily Horoscope, Dictionary.com (including Dictionary and Thesaurus), Facebook, Flickr, ipass, Mippin, MySpace, Navita Translator, Nobex Radio Companion, ProOnGo Express, The Weather Channel, Tune Wiki, UberTwitter, Viigo, Vlingo, World News and WorldMate Live: Travel Like a Pro.

Given RIM sells apps overseas, it clearly has the ability to make paid apps available, so it's a shame that we still have to wait for paid apps to become availalbe locally, but any app store is better than none and some of the best paid apps are clearly still yet to come.

It's also a far cry from the iPhone's 100,000+ apps, and even claims of 20,000+ apps each on both the Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms. Even Android is now supposed to have 14,000+ apps, and with Nokia's Maemo and Samsung's Bada on the way, there's a heck of a lot of companies vying for the attention of developers.

Thankfully for RIM it still offers the most customisable mobile email experience and boasts security that various military and defence organisations from different countries worldwide trust above other platforms, along with arguably the best physical smartphone keyboards, so RIM's tardiness is buffered by some of the Blackberry's strengths, at least for now.

Oddly, although the official BlackBerry blog happily trumpeted the launch of App World in South and Central America, and at the time of writing, has the South African launch further down on page 1 of the blog (something that will change after another post or two), there's no mention of any Australian or NZ launch as yet.

Continued on page 2, please read on!