The Blackberry Storm will sport the Blackberry Apps Center

So reckons an RBC analyst, Mr Mike Abramsky (quoted by Internet News).

A research report today by RBC analyst Mike Abramsky noted that RIM would launch a “BlackBerry Apps Center” with the official sales launch of the impending Storm 9530 smartphone. The analyst also wrote that software offerings include the VZ Navigator (Verizon is the Storm’s carrier), Facebook, MySpace, TiVo, Slacker Personal Email and Ticketmaster.

It’s about time. I’ll be keen to see how they’ve deployed it. I hope it’s point-and-click easy to manage.

The big challenge for other handset manufacturers (I say other, i.e. not Apple/iTunes/iPhone) is to replicate some kind of simple app store that makes it easy to buy.

Last night I was thinking about going to sleep — but before I did that, I downloaded a couple of iPhones applications. Just to have a look. I paid about £5 in total. That’s good incidental revenue for the application developer and for Apple.

It’s gonna be quite a challenge for the likes of Blackberry or Sony Ericsson to get a billing relationship with their end-user customer. I don’t want to be typing my credit card details into my mobile phone. It’d take ages. Hugely demotivating.

We shall see.