Twitter For BlackBerry - Review

Terence Eden — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:38:57 +0000

Blah blah Twitter.... Blah Blah BlackBerry... Blah Blah.... http://www.blackberry.com/twitter

NB1: I primarily use SocialScope on my BlackBerry. SocialScope's terms of use prohibit me from showing screenshots of their beta. Hey, guys, I want to show everyone how great you are!

NB2: Screenshots taken on a BlackBerry 9000 running OS 5.0

First Impressions

I've never understood the need for a EULA. They're long, confusing, boring and a terrible way to make a first impression on your customers. Twitter for Blackberry has a 30 page monstrosity.

EULA Hell

No one reads them, no one cares, find a better way.

Good

This app really shows off the power of the BlackBerry SDK. It's a pity that more developers don't make full use of it.

Tweets show up in your message list....

Message Integration

...and can be opened from there.

Open From Message

Images can be sent directly to TwitPic.

Send To Twitter

Apps like SocialScope and UberTwitter also hook in to the OS so that you can click on any #hastag and @name and be taken directly to that page within the app. I wasn't able to ascertain whether this functionality was available in this app.

Bad

Limited view space. At best, you can view 2 tweets at a time before scrolling. That's not a very efficient use of space.

The Tweets Went In Two By Two

Poor navigation. You can't simply scroll left or right to move between pages, you need to scroll all the way to the top, or open the menu.

Navigation

The software also doesn't remember which tweet you were on before you left. It always refreshes the timeline and jumps to the top. This is really annoying and it's a problem solved in both UberTwitter and SocialScope.

Ugly

Missing loads of features that many users have become accostomed to.

URL expansion. bit.ly/fjhgkdfhg means nothing - use their API to expand the URL
Embed images and media. Show a preview of flickr images, YouTube videos etc. At the moment, it only appears to do TwitPic.
No OAuth! This is partly due to Twitter's broken mobile OAuth support.
No autocomplete. SocialScope will show a list of your friends when you type @ to allow you to quickly select them.

Conclusion

This app is amazing... if you've never used UberTwitter or SocialScope. I also found it to be marginally slower than the other apps.

socialscope – Terence Eden’s Blog

Twitter For BlackBerry - Review

First Impressions

Good

Bad

Ugly

Conclusion