The good news is that a media player is almost available for the BlackBerry, thanks to Sona Mobile. The bad news is that, so far, the performance just isn’t that good. The BlackBerry is slowly taking over the world, but the lack of a media player is one of the features that stops some people from embracing them.

Sona’s Media Player is available in a Beta version for both the 7130 and the 8700. Though it brings much needed video streaming capability to the devices, initial reports of performance are, at best, mixed. The picture quality gets various grades, but the biggest concern by far is that it takes about 4 minutes to download a 90 second video, and the device is noticeably slower during that time. That’s practically dial-up performance. Before we can get too excited about watching video on our BlackBerry, that number will have to get a whole lot shorter.