Research in Motion has just launched Blackberry Application World, an interface designed to help Blackberry users find apps for their handsets. It is a lot similar to Apple’s App World concept, so this article will review Application World to see if it is a worthy contender.

At its relatively young age, being launched merely weeks ago, BlackBerry Application World is showing great developments. There is no doubt that it can be a serious contender for Apple’s App Store, because the amount of applications being made available for free — or with a one-time charge — within this platform is growing rapidly.

There are different categories of applications such as business, entertainment, finance, games, health, IM and social networking, productivity, news, weather, travel, even news and books. You can easily find compatible applications for your BlackBerry handsets using BlackBerry Application World, and have them downloaded and installed in no time at all.

If you are just browsing around to look for interesting apps, you can also see the latest applications added as well as popular free and paid applications. Believe me when I say the number of applications being made available at the BlackBerry Application World is growing rapidly, and it can soon rival Apple’s App Store for sure. This is because developers are diving into the growing market of BlackBerry users worldwide and see BlackBerry Application World as a great opportunity to reach their potential customer.

If browsing for apps via your BlackBerry handsets seems like too much of a trouble, you can visit BlackBerry Application World from your PC as well.

Is it an attempt to rival Apple’s App Store? Maybe. Is it a good attempt, does it has the chances of winning? Absolutely yes.

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Touchscreen phones have been quite popular the past couple of months, especially with Apple launching their iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm capturing everyone’s attention. However, not all touchscreen phones are created the same. It is interesting to see who has the best touchscreen functionality, and we are going to discuss them in this article.

Resistive vs. Capacitive

Resistive screens are comprised of a number of layers. The top coat is usually a clear polyester film, which is flexible and smooth. When a finger — or a stylus — presses down, the top layer comes in contact with a lower glass layer, enabling voltage and electrical currents to be measured and the location of the press can be computed. Capacitive touchscreen, on the other hand, uses crystal-clear glass as the touch surface. They are not flexible, but they do have better endurance and feel. A circuit panel sensor underneath the glass records changes in electrical capacitance, or charge, when activated by a finger’s — and only finger — electrical charge.

Phones such as HTC Touch Diamond, Samsung Omnia, and many other PDA-phones use resistive touch screen. IPhone and Storm use capacitive touchscreen. If you compare the two kinds, you can clearly see the differences between the two of them by seeing phones features. Storm’s SurePress is definitely a breakthrough, allowing you to utilize double-action touch interface to the max. IPhone also benefits from the use of capacitive touchscreen because they can introduce the famous pinch motion (using two fingers to control the interface and zoom level). Still, capacitive touchscreen main disadvantage is the fact that you must use your finger to control the device. You can’t even use gloves, because the interface relies on your body’s capability to pass electrical currents. This is why resistive touchscreen is still widely used, especially in the Asian countries where they need to use styluses to be able to hand-write characters.

So which one of the two touch screens is the best? For the time being, we will have to give the crown to capacitive touchscreen for their features. A capacitive stylus is being developed as well, so it wouldn’t be long before you can use stylus on your iPhone.

Palm Treo Pro is a smart phone from Palm and is based on the Windows Mobile platform. The phone is available in both GSM unlocked and locked CDMA formats.

With the Windows Mobile 6.1 powering it, the phone boasts of wide range of software which offer complete business solutions such as the ability to edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents, PowerPoint presentations etc. The Internet Explorer Mobile software provides the gateway to the internet and is capable of handling a wide range of networks including Wi-Fi, 3G and is operable on the HSDPA band.

The design of the Palm Treo Pro is completely different from its predecessors. Notable improvements include a reduction in the weight and the dimensions of the phone, which by the way of a reduction of about 0.2 inches across dimensions has made the phone visibly sleek. The Palm Treo Pro includes a 2.5 inch TFT touch screen with a full QWERTY keyboard providing the best of both worlds. The keyboard layout is professionally done with a wide range of shortcut keys to provide easy access to some of the most frequently used programs such as the calendar, email and an ‘OK’ key to ease out the navigational queries.

On the multimedia front, the phone supports popular audio and video formats such as AAC, MP3, WMA, WMV and MPEG-4. The micro SD expansion slot on the phone is designed to allow access to a 32GB card which essentially means that a lot of multimedia content can be stored and accessed on the phone. The phone is also equipped with a 2MP camera with 8x zoom and video recording capabilities.

The price of the phone, which retails at $199 for the locked and $399 to $599 for the unlocked versions and the QWERTY keypad which has a slightly cramped up feeling are perhaps the only downside of the otherwise good business phone.

Palm Pre, widely regarded as the successor for the Palm Treo was introduced to the world markets in the first quarter of 2009. The phone is the first in the line of Palm phones which run on the new Linux based platform developed by Palm, called the web OS.

Palm Pre is unique in its design in that the device has only one control button located at the center with a full scale slide out QWERTY keyboard. The phone measures 3.9 inches by 2.3 inches and can easily fit into the pocket.

This phone is equipped with a multi-touch touch screen which measures 3.1 inches diagonally. The touch screen is a capacitive touch screen which responds impressively and allows you to scroll through the lists fairly comfortable. A notable addition to the Palm Pre as compared to the other touch screen smart phones is the appearance of a white ring around the icons to indicate a registered touch. Also the presence of a physical QWERTY keyboard provides an easier means to type out long emails messages etc. The phone is also equipped with a built-in accelerometer which sets the screen orientation automatically with respect to the phone’s position.

The phone works well with all the network systems in place namely Wi-Fi, 3G and also supports GPS functionalities on the integrated GPS receiver. Its web browser is based on web kit and renders web pages very quickly when compared to other smart phones.

Palm Treo Pro is currently available at $199.99 with Sprint.

Also see our review of BlackBerry Bold and IPhone 3GS vs Nokia N97

BlackBerry Bold 9000 is a smart phone from the stable of Research In Motion (RIM). The phone is often compared to the likes of the Apple iPhone. But in reality, they’re two different phones and a direct comparison between the two of them is often misguided.

Blackberry Bold has a screen size of 480×320 but lacks a touch screen interface. The phone is bundled with a keyboard which is slightly different from its contemporaries with a slight angular shift in the keys. This angular shift means that it takes just that bit more of time to adjust to, but once you do, the layout works like charm.

The build quality of the phone is superior in comparison to its predecessors and the addition of quite a few layers of gloss on the body gives it an incredibly attractive look. Though critics do say that the chrome finish on the phone is borrowed from the iPhone, it suits the Blackberry to the hilt.

One of the most important features of Blackberry – the email -hasn’t undergone any drastic change from the previous models. There are a few improvements with respect to the ability to view pictures and attachments and a full HTML support. Though these may seem to be basic improvements, they add a whole new dimension to the phone.

This phone supports all the current technologies such as 3G, GPS and Wi-Fi without any significant loss in the battery performance. The bundled browser renders pages very quickly without any noticeable lag and the addition of the full HTML support only means that the phone can now be used to view pages in a more complete form when compared with its predecessors.

One aspect of the phone where RIM has improved significantly is the User Interface of the phone. It has been tweaked enough to include new high resolution icons.

The menu and the organizer have been cleaned up a bit but not enough to warrant any special emphasis. While media capabilities are not the key aspects of a business phone, the Blackberry Bold could have done well with significant improvements in multimedia category by introducing a better video playback capability and of course a better media manager.

What is the cost of BlackBerry Bold in US and in India?

The Blackberry Bold retails at $249 under contract from AT&T in the United States and Rs 31,999 under contract with Airtel in India.

Here is an official BlackBerry Bold video tour

Related: Review of Iphone 3GS vs Nokia N97