BlackBerry Application Store in the works

on October 23, 2008 - Comments (View)

Blackberry and RIM are keeping up with the Jobs’es, or at least trying to.

At the first-ever BlackBerry developer conference in Santa Clara, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis announced an online store of third-party BlackBerry applications.

Lazardis emphasized ‘Bandwidth, Capacity, Performance and Battery Life’ to the 700 or so gathered developers, many of whom are interested in bringing mobile apps to the 20 million

estimated BlackBerry users worldwide.

Launching in Q1, 2009

The store’s tentative date is March 2009. Developers can submit applications as early as December.

Developers and authors will keep 80 per cent of the proceeds, RIM said in a statement. With touch-screen products like the BlackBerry Storm a few weeks away, demand for third-party apps may be high.

At issue, of course, is the business-leaning nature of BlackBerry’s core market. The company’s success was built partly on its ability to offer robust security and administrative control. Consumer oriented applications could put pressure on the company to ease those restrictions.

BlackBerry gets a browser upgrade

Mobile apps will need to interact with the Internet, and that means changes for RIM’s web browsers. The version 4.6 browser packaged in the BlackBerry Bold, for instance, will operate much more like a desktop browser, with greater support for CSS, Ajax, HTML, XHTML, and DOM L2 code.