Blackberry Twitter Clients Smackdown: Seesmic, SocialScope, Tweeteev, Twixtreme, UberTwitter

As many of you should know, I’m kinda of Twitter addict and the device from which I use it the most is my Blackberry Bold. For this reason I tried all the available twitter clients for BB and today I’d like to share my opinion on the five I think are the best available for this platform (and for power users).

Seesmic

Seesmic is the youngest of this group. Released just a few days ago, it’s very basic and lacks of many must-have features that the other competitors offer. First of all no keyboard shortcuts (but @loic confirms those are arriving soon) and no support for lists or for the new retweet feature.

You can use Twitter search and the client stores a list of the most recent searches so that you can quickly use them again later. Clicking on a Tweet gives you all the information about the sender and you can reply or retweet the content.

The “new tweet” window is very polished and well designed. All the basic features are there, from url shortening to photo uploading. You can also get your location and add it to your tweet.

I really look forward to trying the next version that should be released very soon. From @loic’s latest tweets I also realized they are going to perform a major redesign of the UI very soon. In the meantime, their marketing team decided that a raccoon would have been shown together with the unread tweets count on top of the BB home screen also if the client has been closed (i.e. bug)

Socialscope

Socialscope is the application I use on my Blackberry Bold by default. I’m one of the lucky users who get the latest releases and  I’ve been one of the first to join their alfa program. Socialscope is a mature social media  app that goes beyond Twitter and that should be released for the general public very soon.

The latest version I have (0.9.5.81) includes the ability to support up to two Twitter accounts, Facebook, Flickr and Foursquare. The user interface is awesome and it’s pretty clear it has been designed taking into account any little detail. And, I can assure you, this makes the difference.

The tabbed interface is polished and very usable. You can easily switch from a tab to another by moving your BB’s trackball and you can open new tabs for searches or for Twitter lists, in order to keep them at your fingertip. The main tab includes updates from all the social networks available while you can filter the content you need by moving to the correct tab.

When you click on a Tweet you get a lot of information and can quickly interact by replying, retweeting, sending a direct message or favoriting. You can also get GEO info about the user and track the conversation by clicking on the “in reply to… ” link. In the contextual menu you can also quickly open the user’s profile.

Images from Twitpic and Tweetphoto are automatically previewed within Socialscope and you can easily open them within the app.

A little dot appears in the upper right corner of the tab and informs about the availability of new content for that tab. You can also choose when a SS icon should appear on top of the BB home screen to alert about new content (I use it for new replies and DM only).

Interacting with a Facebook update lets you do everything, from commenting to liking etc. And you can track all the comments to a certain update. If one of your contact posts photos, you can easily browse the photo album straight from within SocialScope (I can assure you this is cool, better than the BB Facebook app).

With one of the latest update they also introduced the support for Foursquare, the location based service that’s getting a lot of attention by the community of early adopters lately. The integration with SocialScope is very well done, screenshots below give you a clear idea of what I mean.

There is lot more, every time I use SocialScope I discover a new feature. In addition, they worked very hard to optimize this client for the BlackBerry platform, in order to optimize battery usage and improve performances with a very powerful caching system. Can anyone ask for more to a mobile social media hub like this? Definitely my #1 choice.

Tweeteev

Tweetev is definitely a twitter client worth mentioning, but you have to be aware it’s not officially available yet. The UI is pretty innovative and clear, but far from the usability offered by a tabbed-based interface like SocialScope, despite opening a view with mentions and DMs is very intuitive and fast. It supports Twitter only, but more than one account.

The UI design is pretty nice, the #2 in terms of design after Socialscope. Using Tweeteev is easy and all the most important functions are where you expect them to be, despite some functions are available from the menu only, not from the UI.

Like SocialScope, Tweeteev supports Twitter trends and you can easily browse them and see related search results.

Overall, a very good Twitter client, despite I haven’t used it too much so I can’t give you my opinion in terms of the global performances.

Twixtreme

Twixtreme looks very promising but my latest test showed a very slow app, not really friend of my Bold’s battery life too. Compared to the other apps, slowness is the major weakness of this application. The interface is nice and all the major features are there, though.

Twixtreme supports one Twitter account only and it’s been specifically designed for Twitter, no other social networks are supported. Usability is good and the UI is very nice.

The new features like lists and the new retweet are not supported yet, but Twixtreme supports Twitter trends and you can also filter tweets to see just those “nearby” (SocialScope has this feature too).

A nice Twitter client overall, but, again, perfermances are far from being great.

UberTwitter

Since SocialScope is still in closed beta, UberTwitter looks the alternative many power Twitter users are choosing. Despite it is still far from SocialScope, the last version introduced a lot of new features and some improvements in the UI. The number of features of UberTwitter is impressive, lots of options and tools available for both “normal” users and power users.

The interface of the new version is organized through tabs (the “Uber Bar”) that can contain any type of timeline, something I love in Socialscope and that makes switching to replies or DMs very easy and fast. UberTwitter includes some features the other clients don’t have, like the ability to attach videos to tweets. Lists and trends are supported, while the new retweet feature is not available yet. I haven’t seen this, but someone told me that I can see retweets with the new feature in my timeline (something very useful, otherwise you loose track of your tweets that have been retweeted the new way).

Something I found very useful is the ability to see the profile of an user as soon as you open one of their tweets (close to what Seesmic does, too).

As other clients, I noticed that sometimes users’ avatars are not loaded so quickly. I think Socialscope solved this by implementing a very powerful internal cache that users can periodically refresh, if needed.

UberTwitter is designed to be used with one Twitter account only and no other social networks are supported. There is an option to update your Google Talk status, though. Definitely a great Twitter client.

Conclusions

As you can see, BlackBerry users have a few very good alternatives to keep up with their Twitter friends (plus those I didn’t review, like Twitterberry). It’s important to point out that the BlackBerry platform, being very complex, multi-tasking and productivity-booster, needs to be threated with much attention. Battery life and memory in particular are affected by complex and always-on applications like those above. I haven’t had the opportunity to test all these apps intensely, but the only one I can confirm is very well optimized for BB OS is Socialscope, the one I use everyday and my #1 choice in this list. I have been using it since January and I can tell you they made a lot of improvements over time.

UberTwitter is my choice #2. They are also continuously introducing a lot of new features and by a little analysis I made on Twitter I can say users are very happy about this client (the same users complain against Socialscope for not having been included in their beta list…).

All that said, a special mention goes to Seesmic. While it is the newest in this list I can definitely say It’s very promising. They just need to redesign the UI (tabbed browsing please!) and add a few more features and it could potentially become a very lightweight and fast Twitter app for Blackberry.

What’s your favorite Blackberry twitter app and why? Leave your comments below!

Tagged as: blackberry twitter