This morning, RIM wrapped up their relatively short beta phase for the official Twitter BlackBerry client, and within the next 24 hours, will be available in App World for downloading. The update to 2.0 mostly revolves around an interface reshuffling, so there’s not so much room being taken up at the top of the screen, but there are some functional additions too. The search bar is now more streamlined, so you can check for hashtags, usernames, real names, or tweets nearby containing that text. Direct messages are now shown in a threaded view, so you can follow the back-and-forth a little more naturally.
Twitter is a social network bred for mobile, having baked within it a character limit that was imposed in its early days as a predominately SMS-based service. Lately, Twitter has been focusing on making their own officially-branded clients rather than leaving it to third party developers to make apps (namely by acquiring those developers), which is both a good and a bad thing. The iPhone app was plagued for a time with what was affectionately known as the dickbar; it shoved promoted hashtags to the top of the screen pretty much everywhere, whether you wanted it or not. Luckily, Twitter axed that particular feature. On the plus side, official Twitter mobile apps allow them to roll out and polish new features to a level that folks on the outside just can’t do on their own.
This BlackBerry update follows up on some awesome additions in 1.1, like geotagged tweets, and a gesture-based refresh system for your timeline. I’ve noticed in my time with the beta that performance is much smoother now too, which is always a welcome bonus. To get downloading, you can find Twitter in the BlackBerry App World.