The Gamer With Kids

DistinctDev, creators of the popular app, The Moron Test, have announced that they will be bringing their popular app to 5 other platforms this year. Expanding on their iOS and Android offerings, DistinctDev will release The Moron Test to iPad, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, Intel App-Up, and the Mac Store early 2011.

What’s great to hear about the announcement is that DistinctDev doesn’t merely want to port the app. Instead, they want to take advantage of each platform’s strengths and create a proper experience for each platform. That means adjusting user interface elements based on the device it’s on.

For the full press release of DistinctDev’s announcement, click the the read more link below.

Read more…

At DEVCON 2010, Rim pulled another surprise out of their magic hat and introduced the new BlackBerry PlayBook featuring the new BlackBerry Tablet OS.

There are a few very interesting specs that we see for this.For starters, it’s a completely brand new OS built by QNX. Second of all, the PlayBook has a 1 GHz dual-core processor which should make this thing pretty powerful. IT can playback 1080p HD video along with some other formats and will include both HTML-5 amd Adobe Flash 10.1 and Adobe Mobile AIR out of the box.

What I do see here is what potentially could be a very professional, business oriented tablet that could replace laptops and netbooks all-together in the enterprise world. Whether or not it can compete in the consumer market with the Apple iPad remains to be seen but on a purely professional level, the BlackBerry PlayBook could do very well. This might very well be quite popular among business users. Hopefully Rim can get a lot more 3rd party app developers to join the party. They will need to in order to make this thing a success.

Read more…

So the week I switch to the iPhone, Rim announces a ton of new things at DEVCON 2010 regarding the BlackBerry platform. Like I stated in an earlier post, BBM will be one of the features I will miss from my BlackBerry and it looks like at DEVCON 2010, Rim announced that they would be taking BBM social and creating a new BlackBerry Messenger Social Platform which app developers will be able to use. At first, I thought maybe that they had decided to finally take BlackBerry Messenger cross platform but alas, that was not the case.

Instead, BBM will still be confined to the BlackBerry only but will now extend to other apps within the BlackBerry. Rim seems to want to unify all social experiences in the BlackBerry to use BBM so that it will be easier to interact with your contacts and friends. It is nice to see Rim extending the usage of BBM beyond just standard messaging.

I would still love to see BlackBerry Messenger go cross platform however, then I could chat with my BlackBerry friends on my iPhone.

Read more…

I never thought I’d see the day when I would finally give up my BlackBerry but that time has finally come. This weekend, I left behind the BlackBerry and moved on to an iPhone 4. My trusty BlackBerry has served me well in the last 2 years. Coming over from a Windows Mobile Phone, the BlackBerry was a big upgrade with some much needed features that I needed for business use – Push email, BlackBerry Messenger, and a much better internet browser.

Alas, it’s been 2 years and even though the BlackBerry might have been tops when I purchased it, that is no longer the case at all. Over the last few years, we’ve seen 2 very dominate mobile OS’s coming from both Apple and Google which have basically over taken the BlackBerry with feature sets and advancements.

The iPhone 4 features a much better camera which is able to take stunning HD video as well. It also has a front facing camera for video chat and the iPhone has a hi-resolution screen. The main cause however for my switch over to the iPhone is just the sheer amount of apps that are available for the iPhone. My BlackBerry had its share of apps but they were just never updated regularly like iPhone apps are and they are certainly not as nice looking either. Also often times, companies will release an app for the iPhone well in advance of a BlackBerry app (that’s if they even decide to release one.)

At the time of me writing this, BlackBerry did have the new BlackBerry Torch out which features the new BlackBerry OS6 which is a big improvement over the previous OS 4.6 and OS 5.0 I was running on my BlackBerry, but again the major problem here isn’t really the OS but the fact that developers are still slow to upgrade their apps to support OS6. Another reason for my switch is gaming. There are so many games on the iPhone that it’s quite overwhelming. Although, I’d rather have too many games and too many apps than barely any to choose from which became a problem on the BlackBerry.

However, I’m not completely 100% loving the transition as there are a few things that I will miss about my BlackBerry. BlackBerry Messenger for one will be sorely missed as it was a nice way message users without using up my text messages and it was all in real time. I could chat with groups all at once which was really nice. Also, push notifications still work better on the BlackBerry as well as multitasking. Apps on the iPhone still need to be updated for proper push and multitasking on the iPhone takes some getting used to as the way it works is a bit different than how the BlackBerry did multitasking.

The #1 thing that I will miss completely on my BlackBerry is the LED status notifications. The LED light was so useful because I had different colors set for different kinds of notifications and I could easily tell what I needed to check right away and what I didn’t. The iPhone instead uses pop up notifications which I am not a big fan of because it is very intrusive. If  I’m in the middle of writing a text, the notification pop-up can completely interrupt that process. It is quite annoying. This is one area that I hope Apple will improve upon over the next year or so.

All-in-all though, I’m happy with the change. I will still be keeping up with BlackBerry news however as I do still have mine as a backup and test unit for apps now but I plan on bringing a lot more iOS reviews to this site in the very near future.

So this is the first time I’ve ever seen this screen pop up on my BlackBerry. Even though I know I have well over 21 MB of available application memory free. This means that my BlackBerry most likely has a memory leak and it’s coming from a recently installed app or update. Time to go digging around.

This is one of the things that really annoys me about my BlackBerry. Rim wants to really push app development yet all BlackBerrys have a tiny amount of space for you to actually install apps on to. It shares this space with the OS and running apps also use this space as well so it can run out of space quite quickly if some apps are memory hungry or if they also don’t close correctly.

It’s because of this reason that by the end of this month, I will have switched over to the dark side. I’m sorry to say this but after 2 years of being a loyal BlackBerry user, I’m switching over to an iPhone 4.

Posted remotely with WordPress for BlackBerry.

This morning I received an email from the Socialscope team that a new version of Socialscope had been released. Sure enough, there it was when I checked the app on my BlackBerry. According to the email, Socialscope has received quite a bit of changes as well as a few new features and tweaks.

What’s New in .129?

Full Facebook Experience
We’ve upped our Facebook experience 1000x with Facebook Friends list, Facebook pages, Full Facebook Profiles, Private Messages and Notifications.  SocialScope is the best way to use Facebook on your BlackBerry.

Inbox Integration
Powerful inbox integration allows you to select exactly which messages appear in your BlackBerry inbox.

Mute
Tired of hearing from a user, application(farmville!) or topic? Now you can block those updates.

Reduced Battery Usage
We’ve tuned, tweaked and optimized SocialScope to dramatically reduced battery usage. The most powerful social networking app now also the most power efficient.

Interface Tweaks
SocialScope is faster and easier to use.  We’ve made interface tweaks through out the app based on your feedback.

Invites (coming later this week!)
You’ve been asking for a way to share SocialScope with your friends and we’ll be delivering that later this week.

Lots of Bug Fixes
We went bug hunting and fixed many issues including url shirking, removing Twitter accounts and location lookup.

Read more…

Hulu finally announces its plans for a premium subscription service called Hulu Plus that will cost $9.99/month. What will users get with the premium service that isn’t available with the free service? Well for starters, you will now be able to view every single episode of a TV series no matter what season and in full HD quality. Currently, Hulu only allows for a specified number of episodes per TV series with many of the older episodes unavailable for viewing.

Hulu will also be available for many other devices now and not just on your PC. Soon Hulu Plus will be available on the Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices for mobile viewing and will also be available for many home devices including the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3.

I’m actually quite excited about this especially with the option of being able to watch Hulu on my Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. If you are looking to save some money each month, you could in essence save quite a bit of money with this service. Many of the most popular shows on cable and satellite are available on Hulu so you could actually cut your cable/satellite service as well as your TIVO service since you can watch any of these episodes anytime you want. Combine this with a Netflix account and you have pretty much get all the movies and TV you can handle for less than $20/month.

The internet has been buzzing today at what many claim are the worst plans AT&T have ever come out with and that these new plans are evil and unjust, but are these plans really that bad according to 99.99% of all the comments? Let’s take a look shall we.

Unlike most, I will take the opposite view today and say that these plans might not be as bad as many are making them out to be. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, AT&T basically said today that in the very near future, there will no longer be an Unlimited Data plan for you to buy. At $30-35/month, these seemed pretty affordable but not when  compared to what some of the other carriers are charging for unlimited. AT&T will be replacing the unlimited plan with what it calls the DataPlus and DataPro plans. DataPlus will be $15/month and cap data usage at 200MB while DataPro will be $25/month and have data capped at 2GB. People are basically up in arms because this takes away the whole “unlimited” part of data usage. Again though, is this really a bad thing?

Like most of you, at first it seemed like such a greedy move to take away unlimited data plans from its users however, AT&T’s reasoning here is that most people never use the full potential of unlimited data anyways so why pay for it? If you check your data usage each month, you may be surprised at what you find.

Checking over my current BlackBerry data usage, I am well under 200MB for the month coming in at around 155MB of data usage. That includes recieving emails regularly, twittering every few minutes, Facebook, AIM, Foursquare and the occasional app download. I do not stream movies but I do listen to Pandora every so often. Another example is my friend Kevin. He has an iPhone and also receives regular emails, txt, uses twitter, facebook, AIM, etc and his data usage falls around the area right below 200MB as well. If this is normal usage for both of us, we could in essence drop down to the DataPlus service for $15/month and save $15 every month on our data plans. This adds up in the long run.

I would say a minority of users actually use more the 2GB a month and I would say those are mainly iPhone users right now who stream youtube, music, and download lots and lots of apps. For those, AT&T is still letting you keep your $30/month unlimited plan. That’s right, even if you upgrade to the new iPhone, AT&T will let you keep your current unlimited plan as long as you originally had it. All new users will have to get the new DataPLus and DataPro plans. Unlimited users however will not be able to tether with that plan. Again, I don’t see this as a huge problem as a small minority of people actually tether their phones anyways. I have a BlackBerry which allows tethering and I have not used that function more then once.

I think if most people just sit down and take a look at what they actually use data wise each month, they’ll see that their total overall data usage really isn’t all that much and they would actually save quite a bit of money dropping to DataPlus but not really that much with DataPro. DataPro you would only be saving about $5 so you might as well just keep your unlimited data plan for $5 more.

Now, I’m not saying that these plans are all roses either as the tethering plan for the new dataplans is ridiculous. For an extra $20/month, AT&T will let you tether your phone, BUT you would only still be able to use the original data allotment that they gave you which makes no sense. If AT&T were smart, they would just throw in tethering for free as an incentive to choose the new data plans. ONly time will tell what they do with this.

Its also been stated that the new data plan pricing will trickle down to its other offerings and not just the iPhone.  BlackBerrys will see this new data structure as well and so will all other non-iPhone/BlackBerry phones. I think this will be reasonable for those who want data, but only enough for what they need it for. Not everyone needs unlimited. Also, don’t be surprised if you see these kind of structures popping up at other carriers this year.

Disclaimer: I’m taking the opposite view here only because the cons of this plan have been talked to death by other blogs. I myself use a BlackBerry and will be keeping my Unlimited BlackBerry data plan for as long as I can only because I can still afford to do so and when I travel on business, I end up using tons and tons of data.

Post originally added to G Style Magazine site 02-12 by me. I am reposting it here but please visit the original site for more articles about mobile gadgets and tech. [via gstylemag.com]

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Today is the day when some of you will be lucky enough to grab Rim’s Official twitter app, which is still in private beta and was leaked today to the masses. As you might know, Rim has been working on a native twitter app for months now which is said to take advantage of push notifications. Well, I had a chance today to download the leaked app this morning and have taken the time to grab numerous screen shots for your view pleasure as well as some observations and criticisms of the app. It’s not the best twitter app out there, but it’s also not the worst and it actually does some pretty neat things.

When you first start off the app, you are greeted with the home screen. If you’ve used the Rim Facebook app before, this layout is pretty familiar as it is very similar to the Facebook app layout. It’s a pretty clean layout, although, I really wish there was some way to adjust font sizing as the default font size is way too large meaning I only see maybe 1 or 2 tweets at a time on the screen.

If you notice above, the twitter app actually shows a thumbnail of twitpics that users attach. I’m not sure if it will show an inline image if it comes from any other source however as I was not able to test that portion. If you click on the image, you can even enlarge it to full screen.

This is the @reply tab. Its standard affair. Shows you all the replies and mentions of you on twitter. Again, wish the font was smaller.

This is the profile tab. As you can see, there is actually a lot of information going on in this tab. This tab shows you your information, but if you click on any user, this is the same tab you see as well. Here we get all the relevant  user information. We can see how many total tweets we’ve had, followers, following, and favorites.  I also like the fact that there is a “Tweeting Since:” section. Good to know I’ve been on twitter for over 2 years. A nice touch is the map of your location. The one thing I do not like about it though is the amount of space this tab uses. You have to scroll down a few times to see everything. They could have probably laid it out better, but that’s just a minor detail.

Direct Message tab. Pretty much the same as the @reply tab. When you first open this tab, it grabs every single direct message you have on twitter. I don’t know about you, but I rarely ever delete any of my DMs. This might cause a small issue with some of you if you have it linked to your BlackBerry Messages App as it will show every single DM in there. Thankfully, you can however delete the DMs from the BlackBerry Messages App and it wont disappear from the twitter app.  One little tidbit that you might find very interesting is that when you are composing a DM, the app actually autofills names for you! It seems to be able to pick up users to autofill from your updates. Very cool.

This twitter app also include a nice search feature to find people and businesses who might be on twitter. Handy function if you are trying to look for someone new to follow. Just for giggles, I did a search for Tila Tequila and found literally hundreds of different Tila Tequila accounts. Which one is the real one? Well, Rim did a pretty cool thing here too and added the little verified person icon on the real Tila Tequila. Just for your info, I did not follow her as she’s not all there sometimes, if you know what I mean.

This is another search tab that Rim included. This time, its to search for anything. You can even save searches for later viewing. Take note of the little icon on the left that looks like a location icon. Well, it is. You can actually perform searches with location filters within 1 mile of your current location. I’m assuming Rim uses either cell tower location or your GPS location as I did not see a setting to choose between the two.

This is the Popular Topics tab. It’s pretty much what the current and most popular trending topics are right now. This is a tab I’m pretty much never going to use as I could really care less what the trending topics are as sometimes they are just really stupid, but if you really do like trending topics, the app does a good job of showing you what is current. There is even a nice trending topic cloud which I haven’t seen with any other app before.

Moving on past the app, we get to see how much more this app integrates into the BlackBerry. If you look up top, the app displays a notification when it receives new DMs. Notice I didn’t say mentions / @ replies. Seems like the notifications only alert you to new DM’s and not mentions or @ replies. This might be a good thing as DM’s are usually more important then @ replies are? Notice also that the BlackBerry Messages app also displays a notification as I have the twitter app integrated with the messages app. (If you are wondering, that is E. Honda from Street Fighter as my background image. He’s watching you.)

Clicking the Messages app brings you to your inbox where you see DMs mixed in with your regular emails. I actually like this as DM’s I would consider to be a form of email anyways. Plus, they are timestamped with when you receive them. Also, it is all pushed to you by Rim so you will get the messages quickly and on time. I tested out the app notifications with the ones that twitter usually emails to me letting me know of a DM and they pretty much arrive simultaneously. Very good to know that the Push service works for it. The one thing that is neat though is that you can actually go into the Messages App and compose a tweet or DM direct from there instead of opening up the twitter app. It’s a pretty nice shortcut if you just want to tweet something really quick. Note however that autofill does not seem to work on regular tweets, only DM’s.

When clicking on a DM, you are greeted with a pop up from the twitter app. It allows you to only reply to the DM and send it. I do like the fact that I don’t need to go into the twitter app to do any of these things.

Conclusion: Since this is still a beta, and a leaked beta at that, I can’t really give a full judgment on the app as certain quirks might be fixed when the final app is released. What I can tell you though is what I do see has lots of potential to be a very good twitter app. It’s not as full featured as something like Ubertwitter for instance, but for a first attempt by Rim, it is very good. The things I do like are that it integrates with your Messages app so you can stay on track with DMs. Because DM’s are pushed to you, they arrive instantaneously. I also like how you can compose a tweet or DM straight from your Messaging App when you want to write something quickly. The layout of the twitter app is also very clean although I’d like to see them use smaller font and maybe use the space a little better. I would like to see Rim add a keyboard shortcut so I can bring up the app quickly without having to go through my list of apps to find it as it does not close to the background when you close the app.

If you are a light twitter user, Rim’s official Twitter app is perfect for you as it does everything you would need a twitter app to do. It’s also very simple to use with a few pretty decent power features. However, if you are a heavy twitter power user, it might not have everything you want. For me, it makes a pretty good secondary app that would compliment a app like Ubertwitter. Socialscope, or Seesmic.

In the end, I do encourage all BlackBerry users to at least try the app. It is free so you have nothing to lose.

Looks like Seesmic updated their new BlackBerry Seesmic app to version 1.1.10. New to this update are keyboard shortcuts. This was one of the key things missing from their first release which really kept me from using it. Now however, this update brings much needed keyboard short cut function as well as Autotext feature found in other Blackberry apps.

List of Keyboard Shortcuts:

R – reply to a user
S – search
D – direct message a user
F – retweet a user’s tweet
L – also to reply to a user
B – move to very bottom of timeline
T – move to very top of timeline
Enter – moves focus to the next tweet

I hadn't really seen this until last night when I noticed a new notification icon I had never really seen before. It showed that I had 1 notification for something. Since most notifications end up in the message inbox, I checked in there first to see what it was.

It seemed that the new icon was a notification letting me know that there was a new update for an app I had installed. That app being BeBuzz Free. This was an app I had downloaded some time ago from the BlackBerry AppWorld app.

When clicking the message, it takes you directly into BlackBerry AppWorld and to the app upgrade page itself.

Now this is something that is very useful I think. I know that the iPhone has a similar thing in place where it lets you know that there are app updates on your homescreen right on the App Store icon. Now it seems that Rimm has done the same thing with their AppWorld app. This is a welcome addition to the app and gives me extra incentive to download apps through AppWorld instead of through OTA links which I usually do outside of AppWorld.

This post first appeared in G Style Magazine 12.03.09 written by me. Original post can be found here.

Opera releases Beta 2 of its popular Opera Mini 5 app for the BlackBerry smartphones. This app is a third party browser that replaces the native BlackBerry browser. It is comparable to other third party browsers like Bolt and Skyfire. For more information about Opera, you can visit the Opera Mini website here: http://www.opera.com/mini/next/.

Loading screen. Loads fairly quickly. On my BlackBerry Bold 9000, it took about 2 seconds to load up.

This is the start screen. Opera Mini 5 starts on the popular Speed Dial screen similar to what they use on their desktop Opera browser. It should also be familiar to those that use Google Chrome which also uses a similar feature. You can have up to 9 Speed Dial sites loaded up. This is very useful as it saves you some time when loading up regularly visited sites.

To add a site, just click on an empty slot and the above screen pops up. You can either enter a new address or choose from the list which is based on the history of websites you visited.

Pressing the BlackBerry button at any screen in Opera will bring up the above drop down menu. It has options to bring up the Speed Dial screen, go forward or backwards in your history, reload a page, or turn close the program. You will also notice a + tab up above as well as what looks like another drop down tab.

Pressing the + tab allows you to open up a new page in a new tab! That is something the native browser does not do. Opera Mini allows for tabbed browsing. You switch between tabs with the trackball after pressing the BlackBerry button.

The bottom drop down tab brings up the following. These are usually things that appear in the regular BlackBerry menus but Opera made them all integrated into the user interface. The menu lists standard browser items bookmarks, history, saved pages, downloads, settings and find in page.

One item to note on the Saved Pages section. Seems that you can save them to your media card. This is great if you want to save some pages for offline viewing later.

Nothing has changed in the settings screen. Still the same as the previous beta. Most are standard features.

Take note of the “Opera Link” setting which allows you to sync your bookmarks, speed dial and search engines with the desktop version of Opera. Very neat function there.

Privacy setting.

Something new in this build is how the browser integrates into the standard BlackBerry menu. Previously, beta 1 only allowed you to get links in Opera Mini. This was quite annoying because some links you only wanted to open in the native BlackBerry browser. Now however, Opera added the context to open up links in the native browser. This is much more useful especially when trying to open up links to OTA downloads and install files.

Do I recommend Opera Mini 5 Beta 5 for most users? Yes. It is a speedy browser that loads many pages quickly and accurately. Some sites that are troublesome in the native browser open up with no problems in Opera Mini 5. Would I use it as a completely replacement? No. I rather think of it as a supplement to the native browser. The native browser is integrated tightly into the OS and comes natural to anyone who knows how to use a BlackBerry. Opera Mini 5 takes some getting used to as many of the standard shortcuts either do not work or are quite different. Anyone wanting a more powerful browser however should consider downloading Opera Mini 5. Remember however, this is a beta build so there are bound to be bugs in the app. I’m not sure if this is a bug or coincidence, but upon installing the app, my BlackBerry Bold would constantly switch to EDGE and would not go back into 3G mode. After uninstalling the app and rebooting the OS did it go back to 3G. User experience may vary.

Get Opera Mini 5 here from your BlackBerry browser. OTA Link: http://m.opera.com/next

[via G Style Magazine]

Disclaimer: I have not been paid or asked to do a review for Opera. This review is done by myself and to inform those of what the app is capable of. I have in no way, shape of form been contacted by Opera prior to this review.

I just recently got into Last.fm due to the fact that the new Xbox 360 Dashboard Update now includes the ability to stream Last.fm content. It seems to be a great service with lots of variety in music so I was quite pleased and surprised when they released their Last.fm BlackBerry app today. I quickly installed it to my BlackBerry Bold 9000 to see how this app compared to similar apps like Pandora Radio and Slacker Radio.

First off, I tried going directly to http://www.last.fm/group/Last.fm+BlackBerry to download the app, but it won’t let you. It is just a Group page. Instead, you will have to go to BlackBerry AppWorld link here http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/1052 to download it. If you notice, it only has a 2/5 start rating. This wasn’t too encouraging for me as similar apps Pandora and Slacker have at least a 4/5 star rating. I went ahead a tried it anyways because I really wanted a Last.fm app on my BlackBerry.

This is the very first screen that appears when starting up the app. Pretty simple login screen.

After logging in, it brings up your profile image as well as”Your Stations.” This is pretty bare bones as your only 3 options are above.

Clicking the “Start a New Station” button brings up a search function where you can type in an artist you are looking for.The results are stations that contain anything related to the artist. You can also search by tags or by user.

Clicking on a station takes you directly into the Last.fm media player. It is a very basic media player. Pressing on the BlackBerry button in this screen only shows the option to close the screen or show info.

This is the info screen. It is arranged into tabs. The first tab basically shows an artist’s bio. There should be a profile picture associated with it but for every one I tried, I could not ever get an image to show up.

This is the second tab that shows a list of similar artists. Clicking on any artist only just brings up the media player again and pushes your directly back into another song.

This is the third tab that shows all tags associated with this artist. Clicking on any tag also only just brings up the media player again and pushes your directly back into another song. No browsing options at all. This is very annoying.

The forth tab brings up a list of upcoming events that this artist has scheduled. Nice option to have if you want to follow where the artist will be next.

And this is the fifth and final tab. I’m guessing this is suppose to show what other users listen to this station but I wouldn’t know. Nothing ever showed up here. It’s basically a blank useless tab.

That’s it. No other screens besides that. It is one of the most bare music streaming apps that I have come across on the BlackBerry. This isn’t even really a version 1.0.0 as when you download it, it is 1.1.1. That means that they have had time to test and/or at least improve upon any missing functions. This surely doesn’t seem to be the case at all. This app really looks more like an alpha/beta app then anything. It shouldn’t even really have been released yet. There are many problems with this app. First, the media player. Music loads very slowly. I’m on a pretty decent 3G connection here and have had no problems streaming from Pandora or Slacker but with Last.fm, it takes more then a minute sometimes before anything starts to play. By then, I don’t even want to listen to anything anymore and want to just shut the program down. Second, I really wish it wouldn’t just throw me into the media player when browsing through the “Similar Artists” and “Tags” tabs. I would have much rather seen another screen that allowed me to see a list of channels pertaining to the artist or the tags.

As is, this app is very craptastic. The potential is there, but not with this app. The Last.fm app needs some serious work before I would even give it another chance and before I would ever think about replacing Pandora which is my go to streaming  radio app right now on my BlackBerry. This is really a shame because their website is so good and their Xbox 360 Channel on the Live dashboard is so fantastic. I really hope Last.fm does something major with version 2.0.0. My recommendation, don’t even bother downloading this app.

Disclaimer: I have not been paid or asked to do a review for Last.fm. This review is done by myself and to inform those of what the app is capable of. I have in no way, shape of form been contacted by Last.fm prior to this review.

Today Seesmic released a new Twitter app for the BlackBerry smartphones. I’ve used Seesmic Desktop on the PC and Mac and found it to be a very good desktop Twitter client. How does the mobile app stack up? How is it compared to the other apps we’ve seen so far? Let’s take a look.

When you first install Seesmic, it adds the little Seesmic raccoon icon to your notification tray. This is very similar to what Vodaphone Update did where it kept the icon constantly in the tray. The number next to it shows you the total number of Direct Messages and Mentions that you have unread. Currently I have zero.

Let’s head to the app now. We just hold down the BlackBerry button to bring up the task manager open up Seesmic from there since it is running in the background. Handy shortcut to use.

Upon first opening the app, you are brought to the  main timeline. Here you see all tweets including mentions and direct messages. It refreshes automatically every 5, 10, 15, 30, or 60 minutes, depending on how you have it set. You can also manually refresh the timeline. One feature missing is keyboard shortcuts! There is no way to quickly move to the top or bottom of the list. You must go to the menu item in order to do that.

*Update: Forgot to mention that there is no color separation between tweets. I would love to see Seesmic use some color to highlight mentions, direct messages, and your own updates in order to separate it from the normal timeline.

Pressing the BlackBerry key brings up the menu here in the main timeline. This is where you do everything. The menu items are pretty self explanatory. You will also notice something you don’t see on any of the BlackBerry Twitter app, and that is the inclusion of the new Lists feature.

This is the Lists menu. When you click on Lists in the previous menu, it will bring up this sub-menu of all your lists as well as any Lists that you follow. Again, this is the only app on the BlackBerry that I have seen do this so far.

Back to the main timeline. When you click on a tweet, it brings up this screen. It shows the user’s name, number of followers and following, location, and their web site info. It does not show any Bio information however like the other apps do. By clicking the BlackBerry button here, you can reply to the user, DM, serach any hashtags they have, reply to any user mentioned in their tweet, follow, unfollow, view their timeline or you can even email the tweet to yourself. The one thing here that it looks like you can not do is jump to another users profile that is mentioned in a tweet. Maybe in the next version.

When you reply to a tweet, it shows the following. Nice graphical touch up above where it shows you who you are replying too. As you can see, you can shorten URLs in this app as well as upload images. So far, it only uses either Twitpic or yFrog. Hopefully they will have more choices for you with coming updates.

Here is the regular update screen. There is one very cool feature that Seesmic has implemented here that I have not seen done on other apps either. As you are typing, when you near the 19 characters left limit, the test area starts to gradually turn red. As you go past this limit, the red gets darker and darker until you reach zero where it is now a very dark red. I find this to be very intuitive as it gives you a visual clue that you are coming close to the 140 character limit that Twitter gives you. Kudos to Seesmic on this small yet useful addition.

This is Seesmics options screen. Not very much to see here. Compared to other apps, its pretty bare. Don’t let this fool you though. The app seems to be quite powerful, especially for its first outing.

This is the search screen. You can choose to save or not save your searches. Typing in a query brings up the screen below.

That’s pretty much it for Seesmic. The app might not have all the bells and whistles that some of the other apps like SocialScope or UberTwitter have, but it is a terrific light weight app that is very fast to load and use. I would compare this app to the Vodaphone Update app in features. It may not have Facebook integration yet, but since it is a Seesmic app, they will most likely add it in future upgrades. I was using SocialScope as my default BlackBerry Twitter app, but I think I will switch to Seesmic for a few days to see how it does in terms of battery usage and how I like it on a day to day basis. In the meantime, I do recommend that people try this app. It seems like it will be a very good app for many.

Disclaimer: I have not been paid or asked to do a review for Seesmic. This review is done by myself and to inform those of what the app is capable of. I have in no way, shape of form been contacted by Seesmicprior to this review.

Loopt Version 2.0 was released for the BlackBerry a couple of days ago on BlackBerry AppWorld so I decided to take a quick spin with it. I have tried the previous version 1.0 and didn’t really find it very useful at all especially since it was lacking many functions that were in the iPhone version. Is version 2.0 a massive improvement over the original? Yes, it is.