MobiHand Partners With CrackBerry For BlackBerry App Store

With the early success of Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) App store, you can expect many copycats to come out of the woodwork, and sure enough, here’s one for the BlackBerry. San Mateo, Calif.-based MobiHand said yesterday it has built an on-device app store for Blackberry smartphones through a partnership with CrackBerry.com, a Web site for BlackBerry enthusiasts. The storefront allows users to browse and search for applications and see breakdowns of apps, including best-sellers, new, free and other categories. The store uses BlackBerry Wallet as its billing mechanism to make purchases a single-click process.

MobiHand said they are quickly switching gears from creating desktop application storefronts to rolling out on-device strategies, starting with the Blackberry. MobiHand’s President and CEO Steve Howard: “The huge success of the Apple iTunes App Store has rapidly increased consumer awareness of the range of great applications that are already available for other leading smartphones.”

There will likely be many companies who will try this strategy, which is good for developers and customers, who will respectively have more points of distribution and places to shop. However, the app stores that will likely do the best are the ones who have access to the consumer, and that typically is the handset manufactures and the carriers. It would be hard not to believe that Research In Motion is not working on a storefront strategy right now that would be embedded on phones going forward. In the company’s second-quarter conference call yesterday it alluded to an additional revenue stream coming in the next couple of quarters, but was careful not to give away what it might be…A storefront would be a good guess.