Twitter has taken the world by storm. Bill Gates is on it. Jonathan Schwartz tweeted a farewell haiku on his last day at Sun. Every day, more CIOs tweet. Twitter is starting to play a big part in many compaies’ communication strategy. Though a lot of tweeting happens from the computer, a large part of the Twitter experience happens on mobile devices, and for one reason or another, there are many more Twitter clients for the iPhone than the BlackBerry.

Yet for the foreseeable future, BlackBerry will still be the preferred device for most enterprise users–BlackBerry’s security features and ability to multitask are both essential to many corporations. So, when RIM announced that it would be releasing Twitter for BlackBerry soon, enterprise users rejoiced.

Twitter for BlackBerry is still in limited preview, but I had the opportunity to take a look at it, and honestly, I must say that I am not really that impressed. Granted, it’s still in Beta, but even a Beta application should be good enough to withstand some constructive criticism.

The very first impression that I got was that it’s slow. Mindnumbingly slow. Only three tweets are loaded initially, so if you scroll down past 3 then you are forced to wait for the application to retrieve them from the server. Want more tweets? Wait a second. Want to see your replies? Wait a second please. In fact, it seems like every single time you do anything, the little clock pops up, tauntingly asking you to wait.

Ok, I’m willing to give RIM the benefit of the doubt and chalk up the slowness issue as a pre-release anomaly. However, once I get past the frustratingly slowness and actually delve further into using the application itself, I am no more pleased. For example, when looking at an individual tweet, there is no clear way to ReTweet. ReTweeting is an essential part of the Twitter lexicon, so to not have this in a Twitter client shows a lack of understanding for the medium. They do include the reply concept, and one thing that Twitter for BlackBerry does do nicely is thread conversations. However, what is confusing is that in addition to the reply arrow, they have another button that says “@ Mention” — which does the exact same thing as the reply arrow. I wonder if RIM meant “ReTweet” in place of that “@ Mention” button.

When looking at the top navigation bar, the third menu item leads to my own profile on Twitter. Screen space on a mobile device is extremely limited, not to mention space in a top navigation — my own profile on Twitter is not something that I ever look at, so it’s very odd to give it such prominent placement. The link to your own profile would be best relegated to a secondary menu.

Aha. After some more digging, I was able to find the ReTweet function. From the tweet list view, you’re supposed to hit the BlackBerry button, and then from there, ReTweet is an option. Why ReTweet isn’t simply a function on the individual tweet view is a complete mystery to me. But, now that we’re here at the menu, I can point out what is perhaps the annoying quirk that I found about the application. It is very difficult to actually compose a new Tweet using this application. From the menu, “Compose Message” creates a direct message and not a tweet. This is entirely confusing, and there is actually no way to send a tweet from the menu. So, if you’ve been navigating around the application at all, the way you send a tweet is to scroll all the way up to the top of the tweet list, and only there will you find the box that asks you “What’s happening?” Writing a Tweet should be one of the easiest things for you to do in any Twitter client, so making it this annoying to actually do is utterly ridiculous.

The other Twitter clients that I have used, SocialScope and UberTwitter, run much more quickly than Twitter for BlackBerry and have much better designed UIs. It’s a little embarassing that 3rd parties seem to develop better applications than RIM themselves.

(Dennis Yang is VP of product development at Floor64, publishers of Techdirt.)