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Twitter for BlackBerry

by Antony Bailey on February 13, 2010

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A few days ago I heard news that Research In Motion have finally started rolling out their much anticipated Twitter for Blackberry application. Soon after I received my invitation direct from Research In Motion.

This has been a long time comming, and many people have wondered if it will ever arrive.

I’ve been using it, albeit not exclusively for the last two days and I have to say. I like it, even if it lacks functionality and useability.

This post will be heavy with images, so be warned.

The installer

: Image by PartTimeLegend via Flickr

Not much to say here, the standard BlackBerry installer screen. 749kb is rather big, but it’s totally worth it.

Friends Timeline

So the application is now running, and you’re met with calm relaxed shades of blue.

First thing to note, is you don’t get many tweets showing without scrolling down. Though this does depend on the size of the tweets shown.

Secondly, it has the new RT display like you see on Twitter. I like this very much.

@Replies

Not much to say here, this is a pretty standard display of the replies to your tweets of those you are mentioned in.

Profile View

This is the one I’m unsure on.

Almost every twitter app, I’ve ever used shows Timeline, @Replies, DMs. This decides to put a profile view in.

This just seems to show your own profile, and seems somewhat pointless if I am honest.

The profile screen has several sections, the top pictured above, the midde:

Which shows your details, you have specified, or in my case set by UberTwitter using the Geotagging (a feature missing from Twitter for BlackBerry).

The bottom:

This looks like it uses the BlackBerry Maps feature. As the colour scheme again, looks awful.

Though I can’t complain, apparently I live in a field.

Direct Messages

This is the DM view. It’s pretty basic, but you don’t need that much detail.

Sending a direct message, lets you pick the person you’re sending to from a list of people you are able to send to.

This will stop that annoying message in other applications that you can’t send a DM to a person not following you.

Let’s discard that DM for now.

Search for People

A nice little feature, I haven’t seen in other applications is this Search for People feature. You can use it to find your friends on Twitter. This is one, I will find useful.

Search Twitter

The standard search twitter screen. So you can look for people who are talking about your chosen subject.

Trends

This is a feature that almost every twitter application has, people want to know what everyone is talking about and now you can see it on your phone. This application only shows the trend, it does not have any description of the trend like some other applications. Maybe next version?

Recent trends? This is an awesome feature! I haven’t seen this anywhere but on the twitter website. I really like this idea. Hopefully other applications will add this feature.

Options

Please remember, this is a beta application so we should hope for more options soon.

Feature Requests

I emailed Research In Motion, to ask them to include features. I recieved an email to say they will pass them to their developers. So it could happen.

Remember the last read tweet. I like to read all the overnight tweets in the morning, I’d like it to remember where I was last night.
Send to Twitter option in the media menu.
Replies and mentions in my messages folder with push notifications.
Refresh on open, so I don’t have to wait for my timeline to refresh.
Refresh shortcut key, so I can click one button and get the new tweets without waiting or opening and closing the application.
Typing @ gives me prompts of people to mention based on the people I follow.