Los Angeles: The smartphone industry finally seems to agree on this point: Adding applications to phones is not exactly fun.

You are supposed to find a program on the Web, download it to a phone (or a computer connected to a phone), find that download and run some install routine. Considering all the detours that can involve, you should not be surprised to see so many smartphones with only one or two extra programs onboard.

But now, phone manufacturers are setting up simple software catalogs that can put new programs on a phone with only a few taps of its screen or keyboard.

Apple made this concept a mass-market reality with the App Store it added to the iPhone (and iPod Touch) last year, Google followed with its Android Market, and last month BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion joined the club by shipping its BlackBerry App World program.

Unlike those other systems, however, App World does not come built into new phones and requires manual installation under the old, inelegant process.

Assuming you have a compatible model - a group that includes the popular Curve, which actually outsold the iPhone in the first quarter of this year, Pearl, Bold and Storm models - you have to visit Rim's App World page (blackberry.com/appworld) on your phone, download this program, and then run its installer.

Once set up, App World should appear on your phone's home screen. Skip its gallery of oddly chosen "Featured" programs and instead look at its categorised lists of applications (under a folders icon) and its ranking of "Top Downloads" (under a starred-folder icon). You can also search for a program by selecting a magnifying-glass icon.

A copy of App World will only list programs compatible with the BlackBerry model on which it is running; last week, the program offered 822 programs for a Verizon Wireless BlackBerry Storm.

Rim spokeswoman Rachel Colley wrote in an email that "more than 1,000" programs are available - a tiny fraction of the 35,000-plus titles Apple claims for its App Store.

Despite Rim's business-first reputation, the most popular category displayed on the Storm was "Games", with 209 applications listed. The App World collection includes some iPhone favourites, such as the Pandora and Slacker internet-radio programs and a front end to the Facebook social-networking site.

This inventory does not, however, include every BlackBerry application.

Programs must go through a review process before showing up in App World, so some newer applications may not appear for a while.

App World falls short of the standards set by the iPhone and Android application stores in some major aspects.

You can't sort its listings by price or user review, and many App World screens take a few distracting seconds to display.

But for all of this new software system's faults, it represents a major improvement over what Rim offered before - much less what Microsoft provides in its Windows Mobile operating system.

App World and all of these other smartphone application storefronts also make the experience of adding programs on regular Windows computers look pretty miserable in comparison.