I am a big fan of Hootsuite’s online version. I use it to manage 20+ social media properties and it is a huge help with managing content and inspecting what I expect regarding my progress. Also, they have a great interface that lends itself well to screenshots in presentations. As invested as I am in their product, you can imagine how excited I was to finally see a BlackBerry version released. Unfortunately my excitement was short-lived.

Breakdown after the jump…

For a mobile apps, I review a few categories: Features, Functionality, Aesthetics/interface, and battery life. I tested the app on a Blackberry 9550 (Storm 2). On a scale of 1-5, here is how Hootsuite for Blackberry ranks.

 

Features: 5 out of 5

In addition to the features found in most mobile social media apps, Hootsuite added the following:

• Multiple social media account types
• The ability to schedule tweets
• Click statistics
• Built-in link shortening

Basically, everything that I regularly use to manage my social media presence on Hootsuite is now available right in my hand. This makes my geek senses tingle!

 

Functionality: 2 out of 5

The app is very slugish. It took an average of 10-15 minutes to load my timeline, @replies, or direct messages. While the app loaded these tabs, my phone experienced huge drops in performance making it nearly impossible to use other apps while I waited. A Hootsuite representative contacted me to say that the sluggishness would pass once the app loaded everyone’s avatars, but after two days it hadn’t stopped. As much as I appreciate the outreach, I’m gonna have to call shenanigans on the rep’s claim. Not cool Hootsuite, not cool.

 

Aesthetics/Interface: 4 out of 5

As far as blackberry twitter apps go, this is the prettiest interface that I have seen. The use of tabs is a great organizational idea and the color palate is great. My only issue was that the interface had a lot of trouble operating in landscape mode. Not all screens worked in landscape mode, and the ones that did  played a game of “disappearing text” when they reoriented.

 

Battery life: 0.5 to 5

Egads! Hootsuite treated my battery worse than Ike did Tina! It got so bad that I had to uninstall the program within a few days to save my poor phone.

 

Final Thoughts:
To be fair, this release is still in beta. While I am presently uninstalling this version of Hootsuite from both of my blackberries to save power and performance, I still look forward to the next iteration of the app. Once they get those issues controlled, this is an app that will crush the competition, hands down…. until then, I’m sticking with Ubertwitter.

 

Did you happen to download Hootsuite for blackberry? What was your experience?

 

Be Awesome,
Muhammad Yasin

 

***UPDATE 10/23/10 @ 2:47PM*** Within moments of this post going up, HootSuite contacted me on Twitter to let me know about a beta update that I am testing now. It seems to be running much better. A new post will follow after I run the updates through the paces for a few days.

 

***UPDATE 2/19/11*** On the heels of UberTwitter’s suspension, HootSuite is trying to gain market share amongst blackberry and Droid users. After months of testing the project, I can safely say that switching to this app is a bad idea… a horrible, terrible, no good idea. The battery problems, sluggishness, and confusion in the UI are still present. Twitter for Blackberry may not be an exact substitution for UberTwitter, but it is miles ahead of HootSuite’s Blackberry app.