Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

If you’re a BlackBerry user with an unlimited data plan, as well as a Twitter user, you’ll be interesting in obtaining a decent Twitter app for your BlackBerry.  So far, I’ve come across three: TwitterBerry by Orangatame, UberTwitter, and TweetCaster by Handmark.  This by far won’t be a full review, and is subject to my personal experiences and opinions.  So, here we go …

TwitterBerry

TwitterBerry was the first Twitter app for BlackBerry I used.  It was originally fairly barebones, but I must say a recent update reminded me of UberTwitter, which I had switched to as my “preferred” Twitter client.  Recent BlackBerry operating systems will allow for media sending; the most recent TwitterBerry allowing you to configure which media hosting site to use: yfrog, Twitgoo, TwitPic, or Zannel.  Near as I can tell, though, none of these use geodata (GPS information that can be embedded in pictures, and is becoming more common place on many handhelds that have cameras, like my Tour).  TwitterBerry allows you to configure what you see first (your “Update My Timeline” entry box, your “Friends Timeline”, or your own timeline, etc) when you start the app.  Timeline font sizes are configurable – so much so that on the Tour the text can be come unreadable!  TwitterBerry supports HTTPS connections to Twitter – a good thing.

UberTwitter

UberTwitter is listed as “Public Beta”, which suggests that at some point they may start charging for the app.  With the newest version of TwitterBerry, it’s much like UberTwitter, with the following differences:

• UberTwitter’s menu is huge, but it includes nice to have options not apparently available in TwitterBerry like:
  • Friends/Followers lists
  • Search Twitter
  • Trending Topics
• The “options” is a step-through setup style selection, whereas TwitterBerry is more like what you’d expect – a page with a bunch of pulldowns or checkboxes on it; TwitterBerry gives you quick access to all your settings that way, whereas UberTwitter provides you with detailed explanatory text for many of its settings
• UberTwitter appears to have it’s own image hosting site – which supports geodata
• Indeed – UberTwitter has many options for utilizing your handheld’s GPS or even location data provided by your cell service, including appending this information to your tweets or automatically updating your profile’s location field
• I haven’t found an HTTPS option – but it’s possible that UberTwitter uses HTTPS by default (I don’t know)

All in all, UberTwitter seems to edge out TwitterBerry – and I’ve seen a few tweets that indicate others feel this way on Twitter …

TweetCaster

For me, Handmark is not an “unheard of” name in the world of applications for handhelds (I could swear that in the days when I was a Treo owner, they wrote a few of the old Palm OS apps I used).  I will admit right off the bat that I’m probably not going to give TweetCaster a fair shake – I’ve had negative experiences with just trying to get a hold of this app in the first place.  But I’ll try.

TweetCaster apparently costs “a tweet” – you sign in through their site to send a tweet, and they will (after obtaining your phone number) supposedly send you an SMS text with a link for downloading the app.  I never got mine, and it appears as if I’m not the only one.  I eventually found a tweet where someone had posted the download link.  When first released, I had several issues getting to the point of being able to give them my phone number – their site was either overloaded or bugged.

The interface is vastly differently than the other apps I’ve tried and gives the feeling that there’s a lot of wasted space, particularly when viewing tweets.  There is a line of icons at the top where you can view tweets, see the Trending Topics, go to a user (this was actually kind of neat), and view replies.  I haven’t found much in the way of a configuration option.  I know from the memory of the initial “firewall” prompt that it uses HTTP only for communicating with the Twitter server.  Considering that it’s a very new application, it’s understandable that there might be room for a lot of improvement.

Where TweetCaster scores major points is its ability to handle multiple accounts.  No other Twitter application on the BlackBerry that I’ve found so far (I’ve heard whispers of something called SocialScope but it appears to be invite beta only) handles multiple accounts.

Conclusion

Well, hopefully I’ve given you enough information to narrow down your choices as far as which app to use for Twitter on the BlackBerry.  I’d say, unless you need to switch between Twitter accounts frequently, avoid TweetCaster for a while.  Maybe in another version or two things will be cleaned up and some of the desired options will appear.  If you’re not GPS obsessed, I think TwitterBerry is a perfectly fine app, particularly as of their most recent version; I’ll be keeping an eye on them.  But for now, I think I’m sticking to UberTwitter (though my dogs might start using TweetCaster, since there’s two of them and they share).