It has been no secret that BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion has been developing a native Twitter client for their smartphones. Early this morning, Private Beta testing for the client was available by invite only and the LifeOnMyMobile team was fortunate enough to get our hands on one.

I understand that this is merely a beta and the client is still in its early stages, but I’m sad to say that I wasn’t very impressed. My initial feeling when opening it up was that it was simply a cheap port of the Facebook application. As you can see from the screenshots, it’s nearly identical with the exception of their titles in the corner and a few subtle styling cues. It is very likely that this is exactly what RIM was going for to give the user a familiarity factor, as their Facebook application is quite popular, but I’m personally not a fan of it. Despite all this, I continued on past the aesthetics and was able to find details that I personally feel may distinguish RIM’s Twitter for Blackberry from current top picks such as Ubertwitter and Tweet Genius. Whether this is in a good way or bad is entirely based upon user preference.

What I Liked:

• The Colors: Believe it or not there are extensive studies done on this and it actually makes a difference; it’s a scientific fact! Sporting a cool dark and deep blue base color, neon green highlighting as you scroll to different sections round out the effects nicely.
• Message Box Integration: Staying true to RIM form, you have the option of combining your twitter messages into your phone’s messages application. In addition to this, you also have the capability of composing a tweet directly from the message application as well.
• Respect to Protected Users: ReTweets will not be allowed for any users that have their tweets protected; this is indicated with a lock icon beside the username in your timeline.
• Easy Profile Access: With Twitter for Blackberry, simply clicking on a user’s tweet will not only open the tweet for viewing, it will display the user’s profile along with a short bio as well. From here, you can easily access the user information including total tweets, followers, following, and favorites. It also allows the ability to unfollow or block the user. Whereas with other clients the actual username would have to be selected or these features are omitted completely.

What I Didn’t Like:

• Refresh Rates and Limited View: This was huge for me. The refresh rate is thoroughly lacking. It is very slow in comparison to SocialScope, Ubertwitter, and Tweet Genius. There is no cache which results in a constant wait for loading time when switching between tabs such as the @ mentions and direct messages. Furthermore, the view is a bit limited with no options in the settings menu to adjust the size of the text size or display icons like many other clients offer.
• Inconsistency in Timeline Display: If you scroll through your tweets and get distracted by a call or email mid-way through, Twitter for BlackBerry will at times reset your view to the top of the timeline when you return to it, causing you to have to scroll and search where you left off. Initially this was quite an annoyance with the default setting at 20 tweets per fetch of the timeline, I constantly had to wait for it to update and load as I was scrolling down to see where I left off.  But even with this altered; it still may be time consuming.
• Timestamp (may be a little more personal preference): With all the twitter clients I’ve used, there has been a timestamp of the actual time on each tweet. Twitter for Blackberry has chosen to stamp their tweets in relation to time but as an age. For example displaying “2 hours ago” as opposed to “1:30pm”. Again, just a personal preference but something I disliked nonetheless.

Overall it is nice to finally see something that has been highly anticipated materialize into some substance for us to report to our readers on. We hope to see RIM continue to move forward with this and hopefully it will be publicly available to all of you soon. I’ve offered some thoughtful and honest opinions regarding my stance on this client and I would love to hear yours. How important are the features I discussed? What would you like to see? Using the private beta yourself? Feel free to chime in, and leave a comment. We encourage healthy debate and enjoy interacting with our readers and hearing their opinions.