RIM today gave BlackBerry beta testers a new version of Twitter with an improved UI that brought it closer to its Android and iPhone peers. The app now has optional push notifications for @mentions to ease answering users back. Those with a touchscreen BlackBerry, like the Storm2 or Torch, now also have the same pull-to-refresh gesture as on Android and the iPhone to speed up checking for new updates.
The beta now turns direct message conversations into threads and automatically offering to complete a previously used hashtag. Retweets from the owner now show in the timeline. BlackBerry 6 users get a special extra as they can now handle some Twitter commands directly from the Social Feeds pool without having to jump to the Twitter app itself.
The beta has similar performance demands to the regular Twitter app and works on BlackBerry OS 4.5 or higher as long as the phone user has a data plan attached. RIM didn’t give a timeline for the beta to end.
