These days you need to have a reliable and easy-to-use Twitter client. I have found a couple of nice ones for Android – Seesmic and Twidroid. In this article I will review the Seesmic, and describe what I liked about the program, what I didn’t, and quickly compare Seesmic and Twidroid. I will post Twidroid review in the near future as well.
Lets start with the interface. Seesmic’s interface is actually simpler and more intuitive than Twidroid’s. There are four tabs at the top, which are easy to tap: list of tweets, list of replies, personal messages and profile details. I didn’t like the fact that active elements (links, retwits, etc.) are not highlighted in the tweet list, as is done in Twidroid. To be able to follow a link, you first have to click on the actual tweet, which will open in a new window, where all active elements will be highlighted.
I liked the way the personal messages tab is organised. Messages from other users are grouped together and shown under the corresponding nicknames. Very convenient. Unfortunately, avatar pictures didn’t work as well – it took a very long for them to load and felt like pictures get uploaded every time Seesmic starts (even if you just close the application and re-open it straight after). Also, even after hours of using the program some pictures did not load properly. And finally, sometimes avatar picture loaded correctly for some posts, but not the others (of the same author).
A very nice feature is that if you hold your finger on the tweet for a couple of seconds, a pop-up menu that allows you to respond to a message, retweet it, or perform some other actions will open.
In the settings you can choose the number of tweets to be displayed in the tweet list (20 to 150), types of new message notifications (including vibration and sound). You can also choose which events will trigger an alert: replies, new tweets or private messages. Upon receipt of new tweets an icon will appear in the system bar.
Conclusion. In my opinion Seesmic is a little simpler and not as convenient as Twidroid. It has a nice interface, but tweet list is very simple, links are not highlighted, there are some problems with images, and it has fewer options. You cannot change fonts or choose whether to show an icon when new tweets are received. It also lacks some other settings that are available in Twidroid. In general, Seesmic is convenient, but not as good as Twidroid.
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