Another two free BlackBerry apps trickle out

Rating: We give thumbs down to Nobex Radio Premium

The trickle of free apps from RIM as part of its ‘Thank You Gift’ programme continues. You can now download two new free apps to BlackBerry. One of them is Nobex Radio Premium from Nobex Technologies. Apparently worth $9.99, RIM says that its “free of charge for a limited time.” The other is Photo Editor Ultimate from Ice Cold Apps. That still brings the genuine total of apps been made available to nine. Even by RIM’s own deadline which mysteriously expanded to six weeks from four weeks, there’s still three apps to go. We make them two games from Gameloft – N.O.V.A. and Texas Hold’em Poker 2 ; plus iSpeech Translator Pro – from iSpeech.org. If you want to check RIM’s own statement on the subject – it’s here. So that’s nine apps released in 40 days and three left to come in two days. Bizarre.Here at GoMo News we actually bother to try things out rather than treat everything in the Press release as Gospel.

Well, Nobex claims the app supports international content from over 16,000 stations in more than 100 countries around the world.

We found quite a few of our favourite local radio stations including Radio Jackie, Kiss FM and Planet Rock.

For some reason Chill isn’t among them so we are just going to have to ask Nobex to add it via their request a station facility on the web site.

As you’d expect, Nobex Radio provides integration with social networks so it claims compatibility with BBM, Twitter and Facebook.

We’ve seen BBM integration working but trying to share with Twitter caused an error which we will have to report.

The bit which is definitely missing from the stations we listened to is the ‘single click’ downloading of tracks. There was no track recognition on Radio Jackie, for example.

Track recognition did work on Kiss FM but there was no sign of the ‘buy the track’ option. From the screenshots, this facility is offered through Apple’s iTunes or Amazon.

So we suspect that either the radio station itself has to have set up a deal with Apple’s iTunes?Amazon or there’s some backend system which the stations have to install.

Our guess at that back end system would be something called ‘Mediaguide’.

One review says that this one click download facility facility simply isn’t supported on the BlackBerry but Nobex claims it is on its BlackBerry App World product page.

Our verdict:

So, at the moment GoMo News certainly wouldn’t pay for this app when its free licence runs out – which could be as early as December 31st 2011.

As we’ve said before, BlackBerry handset owners can only download these free apps if they have installed version 3.0 (or above) of the App World app.

Alternatively you could try side-loading them. The list of the free Thank You Gift apps is here.

And, yes, we know the web site page says there are 12 apps available but three apps are listed twice. OK?