The great Twitter application review

It's no secret that social networking sites such as Twitter – currently the fastest growing of them all – owe much of their success to the popularity and rising dominance of smartphones. Applications to cater to these rising mediums have also cropped up by the dozen on a variety of mobile platforms. Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry phones, has revealed it will officially launch its own Twitter application soon. Considering the popularity of Twitter, RIM has been a bit late to the party, what with unofficial apps such as Seesmic, UberTwitter and TwitterBerry already commanding their own fan following. Twitter for BlackBerry, the Canadian company promises, is a much more complete package than those already on the market. And to prove their point, they've given us exclusive trial codes before it's genermass release. Keeping in mind Twitter's yielding influence in the UAE, we summoned the help of five active BlackBerry users in the UAE carefully handpicked from Twitter itself, and gave them the closed beta codes. They came back with the following reviews. Bear in mind that the app has not been officially released and the beta is currently only available to few. I am in love I admit I'm slightly addicted, and yes I tweet from my phone, there's always something to share and I want to be able to access Twitter at all times, hence the need for one insanely great mobile phone application. After trying many different apps, that got deleted, I hopped on the chance to review the new Twitter application. Being a BlackBerry developed app, Twitter for BlackBerry is very much in sync with my phone. I can run it in the background, receive notifications that make that little red light blink, which is always fun to see, access my music player directly, which means I don't need to log off the app to change what music I'm playing and easily snap a photo or select one from my gallery and send it off in seconds. What I really like are the options you get through the application, with easily accessible icons for my home feed, profile, mentions, direct messages, searches for people and topics, and even a button that shows current and recent topics, it's never hard to find what you're looking for. It's, therefore, fair to say this application has made tweeting from my phone an extremely easy process especially with the ability to retweet with a press of a button, reply to not just one but many people at once, and to put the cherry on top, the option to include Twitter messages in the BlackBerry messages application, ensuring you don't miss a tweet. The verdict: I'm in love, Twitter for BlackB?erry is an app that will not get deleted off my phone any time soon. NAME: Maha Mahdy Profession: Account Executive at Spot On PR Current twitteR app used: UberTwitte Great to use but improvements needed I hate to start on a negative note but the first thing you notice about the official BlackBerry Twitter application is its inefficient use of screen space. The homescreen is capable of displaying a maximum of three tweets – quite a contrast to UberTwitter, which allows you to set the font size so you can see more tweets. While there are notification settings for Direct Messages, or DMs, and New Tweets, the app lacks one for Replies, which gets annoying very quickly. However, all is not bad with the app. The rest of the user interface is a pleasure to work on, posting tweets is a painless process and the twitpic integration for posting photos is plain fantastic. One of the best parts of the app is that it includes the standard BlackBerry shortcut of T (top) and B (Bottom), which makes interaction that much easier. Another is the integration of Twitter within the Messages application that lets you see and reply to DMs without having to switch applications. Other kinks with the app include being unable to set which type of tweets (DM, @replies, public tweets) are shown in BlackBerry notification bar as well as a bug (or feature?) that shifts the focus from the top horizontal menu (Home, @Replies, DMs etc) to the selected menu making it difficult to quickly browse through the different menus. In the final version I hope to see speed improvements (app can lag sometimes), greater customisation of interface (themes and font size) and complete custom notification settings and fixes to the issues mentioned above. NAME: Bhavishya Kanjhan Profession: Intelligence Officer at Socialize Current twitteR app used: UberTwitter Functionality not forthcoming Offering an unassuming communications geek a go on an exclusive Beta test is like giving a 14-year-old the keys to dad's new blue Ferrarri. It's very, very awesome. And, as a BlackBerry user who thinks i-phreaks are clinically misguided, it seemed that finally my moment of shadenfraude was nigh. Me and my BlackBerry-for-Twitter client would tweet off into the sunset. At the very least I expected an improvement on the existing BlackBerry-servicing Twitter clients. That was, if I could