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Review: BlackBerry App World

How does RIM’s app store shape up?

Review: BlackBerry App World
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Research In Motion launched the BlackBerry App World this morning, with 255 games available here in the UK. We’ve spent much of the day poking around to see how it works, and how it compares to the app stores of rival handset firms.

The first thing to say is that RIM has a good reputation among its developer partners, which is reflected in the large number of launch games.

Companies like Gameloft and Glu Mobile have ported a large number of their recent games, with smaller publishers following suit. No EA Mobile on launch day is very curious, but we’re sure that will change soon.

However, the price points need work, as we explained earlier. In the UK, £7.85 for a BlackBerry game is too much, even if (most) BlackBerry owners don’t have an iPhone to directly compare prices of games available on both.

But back to the App World itself. It’s easy enough to find your way around, and the prominence of star ratings gives users a decent steer on whether games are any good. The prompt to review the games you’ve downloaded could perhaps be a bit more prominent, to encourage accurate ratings.

The options to find games are currently more limited than the iPhone App Store. Within genre sub-categories (‘Arcade & Action’ for example) there’s simply a long list of games, with no option to sort by, say, rating or release date.

There’s decent information for each game, at least, with text and screenshots - although it would be nice for at least one screenshot to be on the game’s product page itself, rather than simply a Screenshots button to click through to them.

It’s day one, so more improvements will hopefully be on the way in the coming weeks and months. Making it easy to discover the best and newest games will be crucial, and there’s work to do there.

The payment process is equally mixed. Choosing PayPal is good in one sense, because tens of millions of people are already using it.

It does add a couple of extra steps into the purchase process though, compared to the App Store - where Apple benefits from already having the credit card details of every single iPhone owner. Given that, though, BlackBerry App World is relatively painless.

Other complaints are hopefully just first-day bugs. Having all the prices in dollars until you first register your PayPal account is a quirk, while the ability to recommend apps to friends is hampered (at the time of writing) by the fact that the links to the App World webstore don’t work - as we found earlier.

Meanwhile, after we bought and downloaded one game - Go! Go! Rescue Squad! From Connect2Media - we got a warning message during the installation saying “This application does not contain a signature. It might not be from a trusted source. Do you want to proceed?”

Hardened mobile gamers will recognise and ignore this kind of message, of course, but newer users may panic at the sight of it.

We’re not intending to sound negative and nit-picky about BlackBerry App World, but it has to be hoped that some of these rough edges are speedily fixed now the store is up and running.

Developers and publishers we talk to are very positive about the potential for BlackBerry gaming thanks to RIM’s efforts with the App World, but suitable pricing, effective discovery tools and no nasty surprises will be key to its success in the coming months.

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)