doubleTwist is a freely downloadable application to “transform your phone for free. Your music and videos on any device. In seconds.” (from an advertisement seen on BART). Using one easy to use application, they aim to syncronize and transfer digital media (video, audio, photo) between the desktop and “hundreds of devices” (as advertised on their homepage). For this review I used a Blackberry Tour device which doubleTwist correctly identified as a BlackBerry 9630. However, the Tour is not officially listed as a supported device, which might explain some of the feature limitations and inconsistencies I mention below.

Overall, my experience wasn’t great. I would be persuaded to switch to doubleTwist only if they at least provided feature parity with the Blackberry desktop manager. Even for those device owners without an OEM software solution (such as the Palm Pre and Android), while doubleTwist would be a possible choice, I’d argue that the experience is not that much better than manually sync’ing the media files.

Getting set up
Downloading (612KB executable) the client was very simple. Installation was noticeably long (took a few minutes) as the installer downloaded additional application files to the desktop (which don’t appear to be cached). The installation failed midway due to a “connection time out” and was aborted. Re-starting the installation caused the application files to once again be downloaded from the network and took a few more minutes, this time to successfully install.

Upon application install, the user is prompted to log in or sign up for a doubleTwist account. The sign-up process generates an eMail with a click-through link to complete the account setup. Login is required in order to launch the application.

After firing up the app and connecting the Tour, clicking on the device on the left nav brings up a view to select which media kinds to synchronize with the device and to select the root directory on the computer from which to look for each kind of media. Clicking on the “Sync” button starts media synchronization with the device. The application UI and customer flows bear strong resemblance to iTunes.

Media root location preferences (“General” tab for the device) were persisted. However, my choices of the specific folders to sync for each media kind were not persisted when I exited the app, disconnected the device and reconnected the device. The sync option is only enabled if you check a folder to sync. Unchecking a folder simply means “don’t sync this folder the next time”. It doesn’t un-sync the folder, which is a customer experience limitation. The only way is to delete the sync’ed media files manually on the device.

Music
In general, doubleTwist has a weak integration with iTunes. DoubleTwist only permits synchronization of playlists. There is no way to select albums or tracks, short of drag-and-drop. Playlists are synchronized in their entirety; track-level selection information (through checkboxes) in iTunes isn’t honored. Adding a playlist on iTunes while DoubleTwist is open doesn’t cause DoubleTwist to refresh the view. Nor is there a way to force the refresh, short of exiting and re-starting the application.

The social networking feature is interesting and curious but I did not test it – the feature is probably pushing digital music’s legal envelope. When friends send audio files, it is placed in a doubleTwist friends folder (according to a forum post) if I have a doubleTwist account, or I get an eMail from which I can play the content.

When the device is being sync’ed, the progress bar doesn’t indicate which track is being sync’ed. As a result, you don’t know exactly which tracks have been sync’ed and which haven’t. At the end of the sync process it told me, for instance, that 18 files have been synced but I didn’t know which files have actually been sync’ed. I have a deluxe album purchased through iTunes with 13 audio and 5 video tracks (Lucky Dube, Retrospective). Sync’ing just the videos (music sync option was unchecked) nevertheless caused 18 files to be sync’ed, which indicates even the audio tracks were sync’ed. Curiously, doubleTwist created an empty playlist called “Lucky Dube.pla” on my device in the Music app.

Videos
Videos can be sync’ed to the device by selecting a folder and copying all the videos in that folder to the device. Select a folder through Edit->Preferences. Then, the subfolders can be selected to sync to the device. No further selection options are available. For example, there is no way to choose either an individual video or a subfolder. The only way to achieve syncing at subfolder level is to modify the top-level directory under Edit->Preferences and then choosing the folder to sync via the device option. Secondly, there is no way to remove a video that has been sync’ed to the device. I learnt later by reading the forums that you can drag and drop tracks from the desktop library (within DoubleTwist) to the device folder, in order to achieve sync’ing of individual files.

I tried sync’ing the same folder I had sync’ed earlier and sure enough, DoubleTwist went through the motions of downloading the videos to the device. The Tour only displayed one copy of each video so it must de-duplicate the content, possibly because the same files were being overwritten.

Pictures
There is an option to sync pictures and videos with the device. You can select folders from the desktop from which pictures and videos should be sync’ed with the device. doubleTwist seems to resize the content to fit the device although I haven’t been able to find details on the resizing process. Unfortunately, there is no way to browse or fetch the photos and videos captured through the Blackberry Tour’s camera. This is a serious enough drawback that will force me to use the media management features built into the Blackberry desktop manager. In that case, doubleTwist becomes less relevant or differentiated. I’m not sure if the limitation is due to the fact that Tour isn’t an officially supported Blackberry device.

From the desktop application, there are options to publish photos and videos to Flickr and YouTube, as well as download videos from YouTube into the doubleTwist library on the desktop. I only explored the YouTube download option which worked quite well. Downloading the video was as simple as dragging and dropping the YouTube video URL to the desktop video folder. By then sync’ing the video to the device, I was able to play it on the Blackberry Tour.