Research in Motion may not be launching the BB10 smartphones until the end of the month, but the app store is undergoing a makeover. If you have ever had the Playbook tablet, you would be quite familiar with the Blackberry App World portal to download apps for your device. Today the company announced a branding changed to Blackberry World, and will incorporate the music and video services under one roof.
The new Blackberry World is going live first on the web and then via a pushed update to the Playbook tablet. Next, it will be available on the entire fleet of phones in the next few days. This branding change is similar to the one Google introduced when it ditched the Google Android Market moniker and went with Google Play. Instead of just offering apps, RIM incorporated all of its video, music, and book service under one roof, to make content acquisition a bit easier.
RIM has been going into overdrive with the upcoming BB10 launch. Developers have been porting their apps over to the new platform, and Blackberry is touting almost 16,000 new apps available for BB10.
One of the lesser known facts about BB10 is that it has the same Android emulator as the Playbook line of tablets. This will allow patrons to expand their selection of apps from companies that can’t be bothered to invest in the Blackberry platform. Good e-Reader currently has the largest Playbook App Store in the world that focuses on Android ports.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
