Blackberry's App World

Application reviews, this video will show you the Blackberry's App World.

Hey guys, Jon Rettinger here. Mobile distribution of applications has really been a cash counting, really became mainstream with the introduction of the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. And since Apple released that and made it public and let people start developing applications for it, other cellphone vendors have sort of jumped into the fray and this is a demonstration of Blackberry’s App World, which is essentially their answer to the App Store. So let me give you a demonstration and this will run on any OS 4,2 or higher. So if you have a new Blackberry like a Bold or the new Curve or the Storm, no problem, you can get this nice and easily. If you're running an older device, make sure you’ve upgraded to 4,2 or higher and you can download the Blackberry App World. It’s not going to come on during a firmware upgrade, you actually have to go to a website and download it and I’ll put a link in the sidebar to where you have to go on your device to download this application. So let’s turn on the Storm here. Here we are right there, there it is right there, Blackberry App World. Now one thing I should mention is that while the App Store for the iPhone is tied to your iTunes account, the Blackberry App World is tied to a PayPal account, so you're going to have to have a PayPal account if you want to purchase any applications, although there are a ton of free apps. So let me show you what this looks like. This essentially is your home screen and you can scroll through some featured apps and we’re just on an eVideo connection here and it’s broken up by four icons across the bottom. The first one, categories, second one, your top downloads, and finally a search and then My World which lists all your downloaded applications. So let’s show you how this works, let’s start with categories. It’s broken up by entertainment, games, maps and navigation. I’ll let you guys read those, you can see as we kind of go through here. But there are a lot of applications, quite a few. And there are some very good games and a lot of the applications that you may have seen your friends play on an iPhone or Windows Mobile device, you would be able to find here, it really is a very full-featured app store and is growing everyday. Let’s go back and walk you through the rest of it. You’ve got your top downloads, it will tell you what most of the people in the world are downloading, if there’s a hot new game or a cool new app. So Pandora is obviously a big one, Slacker Radio, AP News and this is just over EVDO so it can be a little bit slow, it’s not WiFi but you can see what is there and let’s say there’s one that you're interested in downloading. Let’s go back up to the top. People love Pandora so let’s click on Pandora. And I’ll show you what it looks like when you click on an application. So you get an option to download it, reviews, recommend it, get screenshots and there’s a little bit of explanation below it. Pandora is a radio that’s personalized just for you and if you like to cross the bottom here too, you can download it, you can recommend it to a friend, you can read or write a review. Actually you can only read reviews. You can write a review after you downloaded the application. Let’s actually go through and show what that review screen looks like because I always read reviews before I buy an app. I just want you guys to get a sense of what this looks like. You can see the number of stars, love this app, this is great, amazing—go through and read all those. And let’s say that you w2ant to download Pandora. So let’s go ahead and hit download and I’ll show you what that looks like as well. So you can see that it’s downloading. It’s actually still pretty quick over this EVDO network. I want you guys to really see a live time of how long it will take to download an app, all these are very light, non-large application, small, probably a better way to describe it. So there you go it is downloaded and as soon as we exit out of here I’ll show you where it is and now it’s installing. And in just a moment we will be all done with the installation process. Pandora was installed successfully, OK or run? We’ll just go ahead and hit OK and let’s go back to the store. So like I said you can do reviews, you can recommend it or you can check out some screenshots in the application itself. So one thing that I mentioned earlier that I should definitely keep in mind and you should definitely keep in mind as well is this is tied to a PayPal account so you are going to have to go to PayPal.com and setup an account if you don’t already have one. If you're younger, you don’t have access to a bank account or credit card or debit card that you can charge to the PayPal, you definitely are going to need your parents to help you out. This isn't just as easy as putting in your iTunes information. It’s definitely something to keep in mind. And really there are a ton of applications, a lot for free and a lot can cost as much as $500.00 on here. I hope it’s interesting. Some of the applications in the Blackberry App World are actually more expensive than you would find in other App Stores like Apple’s App Store or even Nokia’s OV Store. So let me show you what the application looks like and where it goes when you download it so we’ll exit out of here. So I moved the App World into the home screen, otherwise when you download it, it will show up in your downloads folder which is now where all the games are. So we can go ahead and there is Pandora, go ahead and just open it up. And there you go, don’t show this again, continue. Now I am demoing this on the Storm which is a Touch Screen but this is also just as easy to use on a non-touch screen device. So let me show you. Here is a Blackberry Curve 8900 and I've got the Blackberry App Store here up and running and the navigation is just the same. You just have to use a scroll ball instead of your finger, nice and simple. And this is running over an EDGE network so this might be a little bit slower than what we saw before but not bad. So we can go in and check out some games, arcade and action because I loved the old arcade games when I was a kid. And here we go, even just over EDGE, organ trail foul, other than my favorite computer game for the old Apple. And it can go through and see if things are just the same as they were on a Storm or be it on a smaller, non-touch screen screen, but still very easy to use because I actually really like to play around with Blackberr App World. There’s a lot of cool things in there that I can't find in the Apple App Store maybe because of restrictions or maybe this is easier developed for—I'm not sure. But if you have a Blackberry, don’t feel left out, you can get apps and this is a great way to do it to get it on your device. Anyway I hope you enjoyed. For exclusive content, be sure to follow me on Twitter, Twitter.com/Jon4Lakers and what is your experience with the Blackberry App World? Have you enjoyed it? You think it compares to the other application stores out there on other mobile platforms? Are you using it, give any intention of using it? You know, go ahead and let me know in the comments down below. See you in the next one, bye-bye.