I haven’t had time to do a full review of App World, but I tried it out for a couple of hours on a top-of-the-line BlackBerry Bold and a fast network connection. Here are my first impressions.

RIM’s store is clumsier to use than Apple’s (AAPL), but it works. The selection at launch is decent, but with some surprising omissions. The emphasis seems, at first glance, to be toward pricier apps. And, there are some limitations and oddities. Perhaps the biggest of these is that App World is only available for relatively recent BlackBerry models–the ones with trackballs instead of side wheels, starting with the Pearl, which came out in the fall of 2006. That means that millions of people with older models can’t use the app store.

App World has apps in all the major categories–Games, Productivity, Entertainment, News, Weather, Finance, Health, Social Networking, and so forth. The selection is broad. For instance, on the first day, it offers 166 games, 99 productivity and utility apps, and 69 reference and book apps. There are even a few of those fart apps that have proved so popular on the iPhone, something that seems so… unBlackBerry-like.

But there are some surprising omissions. There’s no dedicated Twitter client, at least none that either I or a RIM (RIMM) spokeswoman could find at this writing. There’s a Facebook app, but it’s the same rudimentary one RIM has offered for a long time. There’s no Google (GOOG) app, just a shortcut to a Google page in the BlackBerry’s browser. And there’s no app for shopping at Amazon (AMZN) or viewing Kindle books. No doubt these things will show up eventually, but given the competition and the time RIM has spent getting this ready, I was surprised they weren’t there at launch.

Still, I downloaded about a dozen apps and liked most of them, including the Bloomberg, Pandora, and Shazam apps. But a $2.99 Associated Press app didn’t work properly and looked crude compared with the free AP app on the iPhone. Shazam, which identifies songs playing nearby and gives you a chance to buy them, correctly identified several songs on the BlackBerry, but unlike on the iPhone, didn’t link to videos related to the songs.

The buying process is harder than on the iPhone. You have to download the store itself, then pay for any apps you want with PayPal, which requires going through a couple of screens each time. On several occasions, despite my fast, strong, steady network connection, app downloads stopped in midstream multiple times, And the least expensive apps are $2.99, about triple the cost of the cheapest typical paid apps on the iPhone. Indeed, I spotted a surprising number of $20, $30 and $40 apps on App World.

App World has other limitations and oddities. You can only save apps to the BlackBerry’s limited internal memory, not to a roomier flash memory card. RIM has made up for this by allowing you to also store your apps online, but that’s still a pain, especially when you’re not connected. And, oddly, the apps you obtain from App World aren’t located in the BlackBerry’s Applications folder, but in the Downloads folder. You can, of course, move them around, even placing them right on the home screen.

BlackBerry fans unfamiliar with the iPhone won’t care about some of these comparisons, of course. They will, and should, just be happy that their phones are now much richer and more versatile devices. And, in the end, that’s what counts. RIM is now truly in the platform game, which will make its products more attractive and could make its shareholders richer.

I tried the new iPhone Kindle app moments after it became available on Apple’s App Store (AAPL), and my first impression is generally positive. But first, let me note the key features of the hardware Kindle that aren’t carried over to the iPhone app. It doesn’t support periodicals. It doesn’t read books aloud. It doesn’t allow you to enter notes or highlight text, look up words in a dictionary, or perform searches.

And, if you wish to purchase a new e-book, the Kindle app sends you over to the iPhone’s Safari Web browser to go the Amazon (AMZN) Web site; it lacks a built-in Kindle store.

However, it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon’s servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does. It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone.

This means that, if I were in line at the grocery store with my iPhone, I could read a few pages of my book, and then, when I picked up my Kindle at home, I could continue reading, starting from the same spot.

I also was able to buy a new book using the iPhone’s Web bowser, and Amazon gave me a choice of auto-delivering it to either my Kindle or my iPhone, which it treats as just another Kindle. I did so, and it appeared very quickly. I later downloaded it as well to my Kindle.

Reading on the device was easy. You turn pages using the iPhone’s horizontal swiping gesture, and you can change the font size on the fly, and create bookmarks, which then can be synced back to a Kindle device. You can view any notes you made on a hardware Kindle. And there’s a slider to quickly go back and forth through chunks of the book.

The only flaw I encountered in my brief testing: if you turn pages too fast you get a fleeting blank page or two.

In two key respects, using the iPhone app seems superior to using a Kindle. First, the iPhone’s screen is brighter, and supports color, so book covers and illustrations in my test books looked much better on the iPhone than they did on the Kindle. Second, the iPhone is smaller and thus much more portable.

The new Kindle app isn’t as full-featured as some other e-reader apps for the iPhone, which do allow annotation, searching, and so forth. But it gets the job done and it gives you access to Amazon’s large catalog, which contains more popular and current commercial titles than other e-book sellers offer.

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch owner who has yearned for a Kindle but balked at its $359 price, or a Kindle owner with an iPhone or Touch already, this new Kindle app is a good bet, even if it is bare-bones.

This iPhone app lets you track the campaign anywhere you go.

Election ’08 contains the latest national tracking polls and performs an algorithmic calculation of who’s winning currently in each state based on multiple available polls in that state. Then, it generates an electoral vote projection. It also gives the sources of the polls, and provides recent and historical data for context.

Some iTunes commenters complained that the app’s polling data were stale, but today, it seems up to date.

The program, from a company called Chimp Software, lets you view the data in a variety of ways–most recent data, alphabetical by state, battleground states only, or in lists arranged by each candidate’s strongest states, in descending order (McCain is cleaning up in Utah, Obama is uncatchable in DC.)

If you care about politics, and understand that polls aren’t perfect, Election ’08 can put a snapshot of the political horse race in your pocket.

These first applications range from serious programs for doctors and pilots to silly parlor tricks that take advantage of the iPhone’s motion sensors. One, called PhoneSaber, merely displays an image of a Star Wars-like light saber and makes varying light saber noises as you wave the phone in the air.

Here are ten apps I think you might enjoy checking out, in no particular order. These aren’t meant as full reviews, just pointers to interesting items. There may be ten others, or 200 others, you think worthier of attention. Feel free to add comments with your own suggestions.

1. AIM. Finally, a native iPhone program for accessing one of the world’s most widely used instant-messaging networks. It lacks some of the more rarified features of the PC or Mac versions, but does the basic text-chat thing quite well. One downside: because Apple isn’t allowing third-party programs to run constantly in the background, you can’t receive new messages in AIM while doing other things. This will supposedly be remedied by new Apple server technology due later this year.

   

2. MotionX-Poker. This is a simple poker game played with dice instead of cards. But it can be mesmerizing, because it makes full use of the iPhone’s graphics engine and motion sensors. You play each hand by shaking the phone to roll gorgeously rendered 3D dice, which even sound like dice. The $5 game comes from Fullpower, a company developing many motion-based programs that was founded by software industry pioneer Philippe Kahn.

   

3. TruPhone. This is an Internet phone-calling program that works over the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio, potentially saving you big money over using the device’s regular cell phone capability, especially when calling internationally. Biggest downside in my initial tests: it sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

   

4. FileMagnet. One of the frustrating things about the iPhone is that it has no easy way for users to transfer files from their computers and store them on the phone, even though it is capable of viewing many types of files. FileMagnet, which costs $5, places a small program on your computer, and then wirelessly transfers any files you drag into it to the FileMagnet program on the phone. It works with Microsoft Word files, PDF files, images and more. Biggest downsides: it only works on Macs, but I’d bet a similar Windows program will come along soon.

   

5. SpeechCloud Voice Dialer. This free program allows you to dial anyone in your contact list by simply saying his or her name.

   

6. Movies. This is a free service that lets you find movies in your area, watch the trailers, buy tickets to them, and view a map to the theater.

   

7. Remote. This free program, written by Apple itself, allows you to control any copy of iTunes, on any Windows or Mac computer, over a local wireless network. It also works on Apple TV boxes.

   

8. Where. One of many new IPhone apps that attempt to provide information based on your location, Where, which is free, aggregates local content from services like Yelp and Eventful, which also have their own iPhone apps.

   

9. Pandora. The new iPhone version of the wildly popular Pandora music-streaming program, is also free. It creates personalized radio stations based on artists you like.

   

10. MLB.com At Bat. This $5 program lets you track games in progress, which is no big deal. The big deal is that you can actually watch video clips of key plays before the games are over.