14 DAY TRIAL // Research in Motion was recently rumored to be planning on launching its Blackberry App World starting on April 1, the first day of the CTIA Wireless 2009 show in Las Vegas, where it would also make an official announcement in this regard. The Canadian mobile phone maker came live with the software portal just after midnight EST, launching it as a response to the highly popular App Store that Apple released into the wild last year.
The new Blackberry App World has been designed to allow users to easily download any application that developers have submitted to the portal. The marketplace is meant to offer a wide range of software solutions, combining free and paid ones, just the way Apple's App Store does. The applications can be bought by those who have a Paypal account, at least this is what RIM says on the website.
For the time being, the software portal has been made available for all BlackBerrry users that live in Canada, the United States or the UK, and the mobile phone manufacturer also states that it might now work with every network available in these countries. On the other hand, it seems that users will also be able to access the Blackberry App World from their PCs. Those who would like to access the portal from their BlackBerry mobile devices will need to have handsets running OS 4.2 or higher, as well as “BlackBerry smartphones with trackballs or SurePress touch screen.”
The new Blackberry App World can be accessed here, from handsets that meet the above mentioned requirements. It seems that there are not too many submissions in the software portal at the moment, as developers have had only limited access to it, yet we should be able to see a large number of apps added in the near future. Hopefully, it will be able to attract at least the same amount of users as its competitor does, and this way RIM will manage to regain some of the market share it has lost lately.