Beginning Tuesday night, BlackBerry maker RIM began rolling out its official “Twitter for BlackBerry” mobile application to users by way of the BlackBerry App World site, where it can be found under the “social networking” category.
The app, which has been in beta since April, supports all the features one would expect from a mobile Twitter application, including access to timelines, replies, messages, trends and profiles. But it also includes several BlackBerry-specific options, including push notifications, hotkeys and integration with core BlackBerry apps.
BlackBerry: Still Going Strong
Although current news coverage may have you thinking otherwise, RIM’s BlackBerry line of smartphones is still popular, both among business users and consumers. The numbers for BlackBerry mobile Web usage, however, vary widely, with Quantcast reporting a 10%-plus share in North America (Mobile Web consumption, May, 2010),AdMob stating it’s 7% in North America (OS Share, May, 2010) and Percent Mobile claiming it’s a hefty 22% (Mobile Web consumption, May, 2010).
For what it’s worth, though, the hard numbers based on units shipped saw RIM recently moving into the top-five vendor rankings for smartphones worldwide, ousting Motorola in the process – a change that proves there’s life in the ol’ BlackBerry platform yet. In fact, RIM was the only vendor in the top five with a singular focus on smartphones.
Twitter for BlackBerry – the “Official Version”
There were already several BlackBerry Twitter applications available, but none with the benefit of being dubbed the “official” app.
But unlike the “Twitter for iPhone” app, the BlackBerry variation wasn’t released by the microblogging platform maker itself, but rather RIM (in an effort to remain relevant to the “app” obsessed?)
The full list of features rival those found in any third-party creation and include the following:
- Push Notifications for Direct Messages
- Timeline Support
- Following and Followers
- Posting, Sending, Deleting, Replying and Retweeting Tweets
- User/Saved/Keyword/Proximity Search
- Tweet Photos/Links
- Trending Topics
- Seamless integration into core BlackBerry applications
- URL Shortening
- Auto-Update
- Quote Tweets (editing retweets)
- Auto Complete for @ usernames
- View Photos from Yfrog and Tweetphoto
- View Geotagged Tweets
- Personal Info Guard
- Hotkeys for Navigation
- Report as Spam
- Support for Dutch, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (European), Russian and Turkish languages
Despite its “social networking” capabilities, Twitter is an important tool for many business users who need to stay on top of breaking news and other relevant information, making it a good fit for BlackBerry and its push notification system.
According to the AppWorld site, the app works on all devices from all carriers, in all countries except China.
