Lots of buzz about twitter these days, and I must say the service is really growing on me.

( if you don’t know what it is, the best way to explain it is to look at this: twittervision.com ).

One thing I’m not sure I understand is why people elect to use SMS with twitter. I see two problems: 1) diminished importance of SMS messages which I have set to alert me in a similar fashion to a phone call and 2) depending on your cell plan, you only get about 100 SMS messages/month included for free.

I see tons of people getting messages all day long, and then getting crushed by the cost of all these inbound SMS mesages.

Why not use mobile web, or a jabber/gtalk IM on your phone/blackberry. That way it’s easy to see and track, plus it’s part of your data plan in most cases.

So for a few days last week I tried to see what would happen if I relied exclusively on my blackberry 8700c, and skipped carrying home the 5.5 pound notebook or using any of my 3 machines at home.

Here are how my usual tasks faired:

– work email:
1) obviously the blackberry is pretty solid in this arena.
2) any email over 10 or 15 lines long I generally skip.
3) I miss the “follow-up” outlook flag, and the ability to move emails into folders
4) I really miss the color coding ability to quickly spot important emails
verdict: i can get by on just blackberry for email for after hours usage, but the “maintenance” work I do on all my emails at night cannot be done on mobile.

– personal email
1) gmail downloadable mobile app is great and really works pretty well.
2) I do wish gmail did not cut off long messages such as paidcontent’s
3) for some reason I was not able to open any draft emails on gmail mobile.
verdict: good enough for the light personal email stuff that I do at night.

– RSS reading
1) I know there are a bunch of rss readers out there, but none seemed to work great for me. I’m about to test out litefeeds but haven’t yet.
2) I ended up reading most of my RSS via the google ig homepage and myyahoo mobile
verdict: not quite ready for primetime, but i need to do more research.

– photos
1) Yahoo!Go works great on my bb 8700. Once you sync in your flickr photos, the experience is pretty good
2) able to see new photos for my contacts
3) able to see and write comments
verdict: excellent experience

– general news browsing
1) most sites I follow have either a mobile friendly version, or have nice XHTML/CSS that renders well on mobile devices
2) anything long format — over 1500 words — is not really workable, but the blackberry scroll makes it OK
3) images now render pretty well, so you feel like you are getting the full story
4) video / audio are a no-go ( for now ), so I do miss that
verdict: pretty good. latency/lag/speed are still big issues, but if I had to choose between a newspaper and a blackberry for news, I’d choose the latter.