A Short-Lived Affair
There are few tech things I love more than my dear, sweet Blackberry (recent crashing issues notwithstanding), but one thing that comes close is Twitter.
So what could be better than something which marries the two? In an attempt to do just that I downloaded Twitterberry the other day to test it as a client on my Blackberry.
Unfortunately, I found it to be a great concept but poorly executed. It contrasts starkly with the fluid, effortless UI of the Blackberry. My chief complaint is that it’s too difficult to see updates from your friends when using Twitterberry. The screen defaults to an input screen where you can enter tweets, but if you want to see what anyone else is up to, you have to explicitly select the “Friend Timeline” window via the menu button. Doing so not only takes you away from the ability to update, but the friend timeline reloads itself EVERY time you look at it – it doesn’t cache tweets.
Another problem is the fact that you don’t have access to the full menu of actions when you’re looking at any screen other than the input section. So when you’re checking out your replies or your friends’ tweets, the menu button is dumbed down. To do anything useful, you first have to back out of the screen you’re looking at, return to the input screen, and then select whatever action you want. That’s an extra step which gets super annoying if you hope to use Twitterberry with any sort of frequency.
After about 5 hours of having Twitterberry installed, I uninstalled it an returned to using Google Talk for the Blackberry as my mobile Twitter client. It’s super simple, but it’s still more pleasant to use than Twitterberry.
Twitterberry definitely still has potential, but they really need to work on the user interface. For starters, try putting the friend feed and an input field on the same screen. That would make a world of difference.



While I agree twitterberry is not ideal (for instance, you can’t even reply to tweets from it!), the problem with G-Chat on the BB for me in general is that unlike twitter/pownce/email/sms, chats come in at a pace that demand an immediate response and create a conversational form…
The pace of chat just doesn’t work for me, which leaves using G-Chat as my twitter client as a difficult option.
So I use twitterberry to keep track of the incoming twitter-flow, get any direct replies I missed and use sms/text to reply / post tweets.
Anyway, cool post.