Google Mobile Updater for BlackBerry: Everything and Anything Google

The free Google Mobile Updater application, currently available only to BlackBerry users for download, brings a handful of the search giant's mobile service to your RIM device. As suggested by its name, the Google Mobile Updater also keeps you aware of all the newest applications from the search giant so that your software is always up to date.

Google Mobile Updater

To get the app over the air, just point your BlackBerry browser to "mobile.google.com" and select the "Get all Google products in a single download" link. You can also get the application via PC by surfing to the mobile site, clicking the All Products tab and entering your phone number. An SMS text with download instructions will then be sent to your device.

Once you've downloaded the Mobile Updater, you have the option to install all or some of Google's available mobile services. These include Gmail; Google Sync, which lets you sync your Google Calendar with your BlackBerry; Google Reader, a mobile RSS reader; Google Docs, a Web-based documents application; the Picasa photo app; the Google Maps mapping application; and both Google Web and News Search engines. Icons for each service that you select will download to your BlackBerry home screen for easy access. Click the Update icon to check for new versions of your software at any time.

TinyTwitter: Tweet, Wherever You May Be

TinyTwitter lets you send and receive Twitter.com updates and messages, as well as check on what your connections are doing. It works on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and other smartphones--in fact; it will function on any Java-enabled device, according to the TinyTwitter website.

In our last free BlackBerry downloads article, we touted TwitterBerry as our mobile Twitter application of choice, but now we're not so sure. We recently came across TinyTwitter, and it has the vast majority of features TwitterBerry offers and more. (I did notice, however, that TwitterBerry works over my UMA Wi-Fi connection, but TinyTwitter does not.)

TinyTwitter on BlackBerry

You can access your Friend Timeline, specific users' timelines, hide tweets from certain friends, and set the app to automatically update in intervals of 4 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, every hour, or only manually. Your most recent "tweet" can be set to scroll across the bottom of your screen. And you can even change the font size of your on-screen text and direct message people--another feature that TwitterBerry lacks.

Replying to "tweets" using TinyTwitter is as easy as selecting a message, hitting your BlackBerry menu key and choosing "Reply." TwitterBerry makes you type the name of your respondent every time you want to comment on a friend's entry, which can be tedious.

The one essential feature that TinyTwitter lacks, in our opinion, is a command to view the Public Timeline.