After Matt wrote about the BlackBerry launcher for foursquare, we got a link to the Beta and I thought I’d post some impressions and screenshots of the app because it’s really cool, and personally I feel like it’s ready for launch.
The foursquare BlackBerry app has all the features you would expect including checkins, shout outs, place search, leaderboards and access to the foursquare place directory.
The leaderboard is a fun way to track the progress of your friends on foursquare. For those who aren’t familiar with foursquare, you get points for checking in at restaurants, bars, businesses and locations that are either already in the foursquare directory, or ones you have entered yourself. Just today I found someone who checked in to “a freezing cold snowbank.” This is both a fun thing about foursquare and somewhat of a drawback. I’m not a big fan of the fact that it’s on the honor system. The app should be able to pull in your GPS and/or cell-tower location and tell whether or not you’re actually where you say you are. I know, it would be really petty to game the foursquare system just for badges, but still, video games have proved that if it’s possible to cheat, people will do it.
The foursquare app has three main sections: Friends, Places, More. The Friends section is where you go to see a feed of where your friends have checked in and what they’re doing. The Places tab will show you businesses around you and the More tab is where you’ll find the leaderboad and some ping settings.
Something I would like to see in the app are profile options. By clicking the BlackBerry button, you should be able to bring up options that you would normally find on the desktop version. I’m not sure how long until they release the app, but this would be a helpful addition and maybe they will include it.
I haven’t found any major bugs in the foursquare app yet and I hope they’re going to release it shortly because from what I can tell it’s ready. One minor bug, and I’m not even sure if this is with the app or I’ve done something to the settings, but foursquare is supposed to push my mayor status to Twitter and I found that when I became the mayor of somewhere in the app, it didn’t go to Twitter. I’ll have to dig deeper in my settings to see if I forgot to check something. Another minor tweak that would be nice to see is when you get a pop-up alert, you should be able to close it with a push of the trackpad/ball rather than the back button. Minor but it would help the user experience. Overall, this app needs to get to market asap because it’s really fun.
