Industry coverage, news, original feature articles, how to guides, videos, podcasts and reviews of BlackBerry service providers, software, accessories, hosted exchange providers and more

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my feed or subscribe to us on Twitter!

It looks like we might need to update the UberTwitter for BlackBerry review. The folks behind the project have released a new beta, and this one packs in a few more features, including the much-needed URL shortening. That’s a great feature of desktop clients like TwitterFox, but something lacking from many BlackBerry applications (though I did enjoy it with Tweetcaster). After the jump we’ll list all the new features.

• Multiple Accounts – You can now configure multiple accounts, each with their own set of on-device preferences.
• You can now BLOCK people!
• Video Integration – We have partnered with TwitVid.com to offer you an outstanding video integration.
• Goto user – You can now enter twitter users name and go directly to their timeline
• URL Shortening – we’ve integrated with bit.ly so you can easily send those long URLs now and not bump up against the 140 limit
• MUCH faster photo uploads, significantly improving the user experience.
• Use of the internal GPS is now solidly supported with proper fallback to cell tower based location when GPS isn’t available.
• Icon Caching If you have and SD card, we will cache avatar icons on the card, increasing the speed of timeline displays and reducing network traffic.
• You can now select pictures and videos that have already been take and are on your device. The interface shows the most recent at the top and offers a preview so you can verify it is the picture/video you expected!
• When composing a tweet you can now insert symbols from a large selection of commonly available characters such as smiley’s, hearts, etc.
• Integrated advertisements – Please note, the ads are there to support the freely distributable version of ÜberTwitter. Users that purchase ÜberTwitter will not have advertisement in their version.
• We’ve streamlined the friends and followers lists
• You can now see both the number of friends, followers, and tweets sent when viewing the details of a tweet.
• Replying to a DM from the timeline will now correctly send a DM and not a regular tweet
• Fixed the bug in reply all where it would truncate some twitter user names
• Added reply all to the menu when viewing a tweet

And, as always, they’ve supplied us with a little preview for what’s to come:

• Notification icons on the homescreen! We have heard you loud and clear, we will be adding this.
• Integration of a high functionality third-party photo service – We are VERY excited about this as we believe that it will bring an extremely rich photo sharing experience to our users.
• Integration into the BlackBerry browser such that URLs can be included directly in a tweet from the browser menu.
• Saved searches – integrate the new Twitter saved search API. Searches saved via the Twitter web site will be useable on ÜberTwitter and vice versa
• Twitter name menu – Type ‘@’ and a list of your friends automatically pops up allowing selection

This might not be all good, though. As much as we love UberTwitter, the ads could become an annoyance. In fact, as Robb notes, some users are staying away from this new version just because of the ads. Of course, ads help keep the software free, so if you don’t want ads but aren’t willing to pay for the software, well…

This also brings up an interesting question: How much would you be willing to pay for UberTwitter? It does seem to be the best client on the market (though once they add automatic updates, I’d put Tweetcaster up there). What’s it worth to you? Will you deal with the ads to keep it free? Or would you rather pay, say, $5 for a copy?

UPDATE:

As of this morning (August 13, 2009) Uber Twitter has decided to listen to their fans and disable the ads running in the tweet stream. The ads will be removed until they have released their payed version of the app. At that time you will have the choice of downloading a free ad supported version of the app or paying a nominal fee for a year long subscription.

You can download UberTwitter Beta 4 here.

Share on Facebook | Add to De.licio.us | Digg This! | Technorati