The official Twitter client from RIM is here! As we posted early this morning, the official Twitter Client from RIM has launched as a private beta and we were lucky enough to get invites.  We promised to give you insights on what we thought about it so here we go.  Collin and myself have been playing around with it all morning and overall like it.  As we both used the same exact application, we some how had similar, yet different experiences.

Mac’s Insight:

I mentioned earlier this morning that I was excited for the application and was definitely thinking about it in my sleep.  As the OTA link was supposed to be valid at 9am, I went ahead and tried a bit earlier to see that the link worked!  Any way, back to the application…

The layout is very straight forward as we saw in the leaked screenshot sometime ago.  My favorite part of the app is the last Popular Topics tab where you can see current and recent trending topics of Twitter.  Then you can click any of them to see the tweets for it.  Everything in the application is available on the tabs and you don’t have to keep selecting the menu to navigate through endless screens performing different tasks. If you do decide to hit menu, all the same tabs are available there as well including others such as the manaul update and refresh button. I love being able to view my own profile where it shows Tweets, Followers, Following, and Favorites.  Underneath it is the actual Twitter profile with all the info including Bio, Webuste, Location, etc.

One problem I was having was lag issues where the application would just freeze on me when attempting to update my status.  From the look of it, this is occurring when Twitter is updating itself every 5 minutes, fetching new tweets.  This seems to be a problem I am only having, as it works smooth on Collin’s (still lagging when opening profiles of course though).  Another annoyance I found was that you can’t make it fetch tweets every 2-3 minutes, but 5 rather.  I like to be live at all times almost and 5 minutes is just doubling up on my load time.  Lastly, I hate that you can’t view as many tweets at a time as before.  As you can see on the screen, you can fit only 2 tweets, maximum 2.5 if you’re scrolling down.  There’s something I miss from SocialScope.  What else? I want to have multiple Twitter accounts in one client!

Collin’s Insight:

This app rocks.  From the very start, I enjoyed it a lot.  As I only have a single Twitter account, it doesn’t bother me that it’s a single user and not multiple.  Lags and freezage never really occurred, only during the obvious moments when fetching new tweets.  I would like to see the application use caching to avoid tragic moments where you’ll get locked up.  All the other Twitter clients do it, and RIM should definitely implement it as well.  As Mac favors seeing multiple tweets at a time, I don’t mind the larger resolution where you see more for each person, rather than smaller resolution with less info.

The trending topics screen is awesome.  They’ve made it look like a tag cloud that you typically see in a blog (we have that too).  As you see above, those are the current trends in tag cloud format, while the overall trends get listed in an organized list.  I like the tag cloud style better and think both windows should be like that.

I hate, hate, hate the time waiting when clicking in between the tabs.  I’m typing in the beta forums for RIM’s Twitter client today that they need to address this problem as Twitter is very well known to get hectic at times with DM’s, replies, and TwitPics.

That wraps up what we think so far.  We’ll be testing this all month until the final release and will be giving you guys more insight as we play around with it more.

-Mac Jadalhack

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