The Canadian telecommunication and wireless equipment company RIM (Research In Motion Limited) has announced that it is lowering the pricing of BlackBerry World Apps ahead of BlackBerry 10 launch.
The current lowest tier of pricing — previously £1.00 — will fall to £0.75 in the UK.
The BlackBerry Blog post says,
In preparation for launch of BlackBerry 10, we will be starting the first wave of our planned pricing update in BlackBerry World. This first wave will update the British Pound (GPB) and Euro (EUR) currencies. Shortly after we will be rolling out updates to other currencies and will be informing you in advance of those changes.
This price tier update includes updated currency exchange rates and VAT requirements. These updates will help to position your content items to be more competitive and attractive to customers in the UK and Eurozone markets. The goal of this adjustment is to ensure prices are in line with currency fluctuations and ensure content within BlackBerry World is competitive.
The price change is completely automatic and will not impact the availability of your content items to customers. You are not required to take any action.
So what does this mean for the customer?
Currently, the lowest tier in the UK is £1.00. Once the price tier changes are implemented, the lowest tier will be £0.75. For Euros the tier will vary by country. For example, in France the current lowest tier is €0.99. With the pricing tier changes, the new lowest tier will be €0.89.
After much criticism and numerous delays, RIM announced that their new operating system BlackBerry 10 (BB10) will launch on January 30, 2013 in numerous countries.
Unlike previous generations of BlackBerry OS BlackBerry 10 is based on a Unix-like platform called QNX. It features an all-new UI and home screen with live tiles more akin to Windows Phone 8 than BlackBerry 7.
