New York — After proving its popularity on the BlackBerry, UberTwitter, the longstanding mobile Twitter app is now trying to make a name for itself on the iPhone. The current version has been released as a beta, with the full 1.0 version being announced for December.
The free beta version hitting Monday on Apple’s system both with many of the handy conventional Twitter features, but also with extras that are not possible on BlackBerry phones, is designed to give iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users full access to their Twitter accounts from their mobile devices. You can see the tweets you follow, post your own tweets, search for tweets, and manage your Twitter account.
Company CEO Paul McDonald described the move as a reaction to the iPhone overtaking the BlackBerry. Apple’s launch of the iPhone 4 assisted it get a rare but possibly sustainable lead over RIM in the US, helped in part by many former BlackBerry users switching either to iPhones or to Android.
“Given the iPhone’s ballooning dominance among smartphone users, we wanted to extend our product offering to its users while making sure our app offered features that would complement the platform’s unique functionality,”
The app offers a couple of especially useful options. Tapping on a tweet opens it and any linked content in one single Live Preview window, sparing you from having to bounce back and forth between different windows. Rotating the phone invokes UberView, a landscape mode that shows the timeline and linked content from an update at the same time; the individual message and the content can also be seen in portrait mode.
(Credit: UberTwitter)
UberTwitter remains one of the first Twitter apps for the BlackBerry and is still counted as one of its most precious crown, with virtually all of the nine million downloads so far going to the platform. But, the decision to port the app to the iPhone may reflect mounting frustration with a lack of growth and attention in BlackBerry App World. The store only just started shipping pre-loaded on BlackBerry phones this summer and reached 10,000 apps a year and a half into its existence, 50 percent slower than Android and three times slower than iOS.
With many countless advanced Twitter clients — such as TweetDeck and HootSuite — already being available for the iOS platform, UberTwitter will have a tough time convincing iPhone users it is the right Twitter client for them. A finished version should be available by mid-December. Meanwhile, UberTwitter is available for free from iTunes.