So as promise, I present the aftermath of SocialScope for the Blackberry. When I received the early copy I was stoked, and highly excited. But now that the excited has faded and the real day to day use is in progress, I thought it time to give you a real user experience to help in either fueling your jealously or furthering your desire for this application.
First let’s talk about Battery power. I normally because of the 3G on my Blackberry Bold I can get through the day and then around 4:45pm – 5pm I’ll recharge my phone while at my 9-5. Today I launched SocialScope at 11am and ran it throughout the day. I also had Viigo going and Google’s Latitude. So today by 4pm I was down to 20%. This last till I got home around 5pm and then I had to charge it again. Not bad for the day, but if my day didn’t end there that would of been a problem. All in all though, it last the about the same time as my Blackberry would have without it.
Usage definitely took a couple days to get use to. If you are a one Twitter account person then it isn’t too but, but if you need to monitor more than one, it gets a little tricky. The best way to say it is information overload, it takes a little bit to get use to all the tweets at once, but once you do it is not bad at all. I really like the ability to create groups for people, so far as a test I have create a group for people whose tweets I don’t want to get lost in the sea of all tweets. And when I log off, it doesn’t disappear, it remains when I log in again. I also love the fact that I can do the Twitter searches from within the application.
Another great is being able to look at a person’s profile, and recent tweets, as well as follow them all from within the application! I must note that though I can follow people within the application, for some reason the unfollowing part just wouldn’t work. Another improvement they made, which seems to be useless is the Facebook part. Yes you can comment on Facebook statuses, but you can’t see the other comments made. Not bad, a one step at a time thing, but wish that was there. There is also the feature of being able to look at photo in the app, since one I don’t get at all. You use in the last version, in the stream you could see little thumbnails when someone uploaded a new picture to Facebook, if you clicked on it, it would launch the browsers which I didn’t like. Now when you click on the pictures in the stream, it doesn’t launch the browser, but goes to another screen with the same tiny thumbnails. I don’t see the point of this, why go into another screen and not even enlarge the images some like they do with the Twitpic. So this part seems useless.
There is a couple quirks with the application, but the quirks really don’t outweigh the pros of this app. The biggest negative to this application is still the fact that you seem to have to wait forever to get a invite to this application. I spoke to the CEO, he said they are really hoping that they will be able to get the application to the point where the need for invites will be no longer and that they are hoping to move to a public beta soon. The application did get updated twice already in the time I had it from v9.5.5 to v9.5.6 to v9.5.7 No firm date was giving, but he did say sooner rather than later. So stay tuned folks and yes this application is well worth the wait! So if you have registered for a invite yet, do so at www.socialscope.net