BlackBerry App World 1.1 brings new features

When we walked through BlackBerry App World a few months back, there was an immediate need for an upgrade. The program ate memory, lagged a bit, and wasn’t arranged in the most intuitive manner. RIM has looked at those issues and more, and via the Official BlackBerry Blog we learn that they’ve released App World 1.1. It presents a number of upgrades, including the ability to archive applications and a better search mechanism. After the jump we’ll go over everything. The best thing they did for search was adding the ability to filter the results. Instead of one sorting option, relevance, RIM has added the ability to view apps by newest, name, price, vendor, or popularity. That should make seeking out applications, especially free applications, a bit easier. They’ve also added top 25 lists, separated into paid and free applications. This was one issue we heard a lot on when App World debuted. People like free applications, and want easy access to them. With the top 25 list and the ability to sort by price, that consumer wish has become a reality. The neatest feature of the new App World is the ability to archive your downloaded applications. When you are in the My World screen of App World, click the Menu button and select Archive. That will uninstall the application from flash memory and place it on your memory card. This won’t totally kill the app, though — it will still either be on the home screen (for OS 4.5 users) or in the Downloads directory (4.6 and higher). Archived apps are marked with a little green arrow, and clicking on the app will cause a prompt for you to restore the app. This is a great memory-saving feature. While it would be even nicer to actually run applications from the memory card — or have the ability to re-download applications you’ve Archived, rather than taking up room on your memory card — the Archiving feature is a welcome one. It certainly saves those of us who don’t have a ton of flash memory available.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.