eBay opens auction app for BlackBerry

RIM's BlackBerry App World is slowly but surely gaining ground as a storefront for distributing BlackBerry applications. eBay is the latest major company to forge a presence in the storefront, in the form of an eBay app for BlackBerry auctioneers in the U.S. and Canada.

The official eBay for BlackBerry application, which was co-developed by eBay and RIM, includes features to search for, track, and buy an item from the smartphone. Unsurprisingly, the eBay app accepts PayPal payments--PayPal has not only been an eBay company since 2002, it is also currently the only payment system for purchasing BlackBerry apps through the App World.

(Credit: RIM/BlackBerry)

In addition to letting users search and buy, the eBay app will notify you of your bidding status, including when you've won or lost a bid. It can also schedule auction-related reminders in the BlackBerry calendar.

eBay's app isn't the first of its kind for the BlackBerry platform. Earlier this year, Bonfire Media released U.S. and international versions of its app, Pocket Auctions for eBay. Since Pocket Auctions doesn't include hooks into the phone's native calendar, and costs $10, we're guessing that most eBay fans will easily pick the free, official app over Bonfire Media's third-party offering.

We got a brief demo of the then-under-wraps eBay app at the BlackBerry Developer Conference earlier this month. We liked the ease of the PayPal integration, but we won't really know how well the app works until we've spent some time with it. Tune back for our first impressions.