RIM's carrier-billing hat-trick with Vodafone, Telefonica & T-Mobile

Congratulations to the team at RIM who’ve notched up a perfect hat-trick this morning announcing not one, not two but three carrier-billing partnerships with the global behemoths of Vodafone, Telefonica and T-Mobile (Deutsche Telecom).

This is excellent news.

It means that shortly, if you’re an App World user, you’ll be able to pay for your downloads via one-click carrier billing, rather than having to type in your PayPal details.

Although PayPal is highly useful, it’s a total arse for me because the service insisted I use a crazily complicated password to prevent hacking. Which means that actually using PayPal is a Cecil B DeMille production involving copious copying and pasting. Just bill me. Hit me. Just get it done. This is what I want from App World. I just want to get the app or the content. Ergo, I think RIM will shortly find a heck of a lot more downloads completing when it introduces the service across these new operators.

I’m also looking forward to hearing from application developers who should really, really benefit from this news.

It’s not just payments for downloads — you’ll also be able to charge in-app payments to your bill as well. Absolutely fantastic. Whenever I’ve looked at any conversion statistics in the context of carrier billing, the numbers are always off the charts compared to credit card, PayPal and so on.

If you’re a Vodafone customer, expect App World carrier billing to be available for the following countries: United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Greece and Ireland. More countries to follow suit.

No word yet on which Telefonica and Deutsche countries will get carrier billing on App World but I think it’s a fair bet to assume the UK and Germany will be enabled as a priority.

Good news, RIM.

I’ll be popping by their stand later today to have a wander around. More shortly!