Intel Introduces AppUp Store, We Go Hands-On

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With the success of the iPhone App Store, “app store” has become a buzz word in the tech world, and Intel is hoping to fill a niche by providing an app store for Intel Atom-powered netbooks. The storefront, called AppUp, is being offered by Intel directly and developers are a member of the Atom Developer Program.

It has everything you’d expect from an app store these days – both free and paid apps, a rating system, and different categories. A lot of the apps seem to be based around social networking sites, but they have apps from Boxee, and ones that provide news.

To properly test the AppUp store, I took the liberty of installing it on my Dell Inspiron Mini 1011 netbook. Well, it’s an app store. The storefront UI pushes itself to fullscreen and looks pretty decent. All of the apps are pretty simple and seem to be widget based.

The most popular apps, according to the home page, are Yoono Desktop (an app that combines IM software), Boxee (the famous media center software, for some reason, despite being the #2 most downloaded app, AppUp users have given it a rating of 1 star) and Blog This!, which lets you remotely post Twitter updates, Facebook status updates or to WordPress.

I decided to try Blog This!, and found it was pretty buggy. There was no WordPress option (despite the store description) and the Facebook option returned some error from Facebook (it looked like the Blog This! developers didn’t have the right URLs in their internal code). Overall, I was pretty unimpressed with it, but it was free. Of course, the disclaimer here is that the whole store is in “Beta” right now.

The installation process is pretty simple. The apps download and install themselves to your netbook without any installation dialog boxes, and it even adds them to your desktop and start menu, so you can use them without having to launch the AppUp storefront.

After using it for 10-15 minutes, nothing terribly exciting stands out. The apps range in price from $10 to $2 (not including the ton of free apps). There isn’t much of a selection compared to the mobile platforms, and what selection there is, is pretty weak.

I can’t help but wonder why Intel even bothered with this. Windows is the most accessible software platform in the world. The only point I can see is that the applications are all small and should easily be able to run on netbooks, which can have trouble with bigger applications sometimes.

Intel says the AppUp store will come pre-installed on netbooks from ASUS, Dell and others, and hopefully better developers will jump at the chance for that audience and flock to the market. Until then, current Atom users can skip the AppUp store.