To fully dive into the Twitter experience you need it on your phone. You have to be able to tweet something as soon as it crosses your mind. Sure there’s a way to make it work through text messages but if you have a BlackBerry you’re gonnna want a proper app. I’ve tried 4 different ones in the last couple months so I thought I’d round up my thoughts on each one. Here is my first ever consumer report.

1. TwitterBerry

This is usually the first Twitter app that people get on a BlackBerry. For a long time I think it was the only one, and the name really gives you the impression that it’s all you need. At first glance it seems like it does the trick. After all, Twitter is pretty simple: you send your tweets, you follow your friends’ timeline and you check your replies. However Twitterberry is lacking in a few functions. The biggest thing missing is the absence of Direct Messages. You also can’t go look at someone’s profile, nor can you follow/unfollow users from Twitterberry, nor is there a ReTweet option. The most frustrating problem is just that it sometimes freezes, and nothing on a BlackBerry should ever freeze. Still, it remains the de facto program for most BlackBerry users. 

Rating: 6/10

2. Ubertwitter

The name Übertwitter holds lots of promise, and luckily it lives up to it pretty well. As expected, on top of the usual functions that we got used to with Twitterberry, Übertwitter allows you to send and receive Direct Messages and ReTweet. The newest update also integrates TwitPic so that when someone links an image it loads up with the message. Übertwitter’s biggest innovation is its use of your phone’s GPS capabilities: when you post a message or link a picture you can also have it show your location on a map. Of course that function can also be turned off for those scared of Big Brother… or those on the creep. One slight shortfall is not being able to go to another user’s profile. Personally I don’t the fact that the program loads up the messages from scratch each time you launch it, rather than starting from what was already there. It takes a while. On that note, some of these newer programs allow you to choose how many posts get loaded per refresh. The advantage is that it doesn’t take as long as Twitterberry to load up. The disadvantage is, unless you go play with the preferences, if you haven’t opened the program in a few hours you sometimes miss out on posts as it will only load the last hour or so of activity.

Rating: 8/10

3. Tiny Twitter

This one stinks. It has decent functions, better ones than Twitterberry but the interface is terrible. As you can see on the screenshot it does this minimize/maximize thing on whatever message is selected. That becomes very annoying as soon as you start scrolling up and down and all these messages collapse and expand. You do a lot of scrolling on Twitter because there’s a lot of crap, so this discredits everything, in my humble opinion.

Rating: 4/10

4. Tweet Genius 

The holy grail of Twitter programs, these guys took an interesting approach to build hype to the release. They started by giving it to select VIP’s. I had it – they hit me on Twitter, conveniently enough. The first person I heard of who had it was Fat Joe’s right hand man, Macho! It just recently got released to the public, but it’s the only program that isn’t free. Right now it’s $4.99 and it will be $9.99 after this sale, so it’s symbolic more than anything. 

It’s definitely the most thorough Twitter app. You can DM, ReTweet, track certain users, search all of Twitter, view your own timeline, go to any user’s profile, follow/unfollow them… the list goes on. It also offers GPS location like Übertwitter, although I haven’t tried it. It integrates TwitPic on a few levels. First, when someone posts a TwitPic link the pic shows up in the message. Second, it adds a menu option in your BlackBerry’s media browser so that when you take a picture there’s a “Send to TwitPic (Tweet Genius)” option. However I tried it twice and it failed. 

The biggest difference from the other programs is a more refined user interface. There’s a menu with dedicated sections for timeline, replies and DM’s. Within each section, posts are color-coded if they come from you or are addressed to you. There’s nifty little animations. It offers plenty of shortcuts too. It’s pretty classy, I must say. The only pitfall is that it uses a bit too much processing power. But every new update seems to run smoother.

Rating: 9/10