CTIA 09: BlackBerry App World not living up to the hype

CTIA 09 is well under way and there have been a number of great stories coming from behind the doors, one of the biggest has to be the new BlackBerry App World, RIM’s answer to Apple’s App Store for its iPhone. App World has 163 games, 89 utilities and 11 social networking apps; it is early days for App World and has a huge hill to climb.

CNET has been spending some time with the new service for BlackBerry handsets and although they like the layout, it does not live up to all the hype. The first thing that CNET has a problem with is how RIM has tethered all of its BlackBerry users to PayPal as the payment process system, but there is some logic to the decision.

This is not a huge problem, as most business users will already have a PayPal account set up. The other problem is with the trackball device, you will have to scroll through the entire end-user license agreement before you can even attempt to install the application.

BlackBerry App World is a bit slow and nowhere near as fast as the App Store is when it comes to using it on the 3G network. The apps only seem to download to the handset memory and not the MicroSD card that you install as extra storage.

Let us know your thoughts on the BlackBerry App World