I cannot say that we waited a whole year for this, but the release of an official Twitter client for Android was quite a big milestone, which was noticed by the community. Let’s see what Twitter can and cannot do, how it differs from other applications, and whether it is worth installing, and more importantly keeping on your phone.
Twitter’s main screen is a matrix of icons, which lead to various areas of the program. From here you can get to the list of new tweets and check the total number of messages at the same time, check your private messages and mentions. Poplar tags and phrases like “wow” or “ohweee” are displayed at the bottom of this window.
If you turn the animation on, then you will see clouds moving at the top and bottom of the screen. I got tired of this quite quickly and disabled this feature.
User’s picture is shown to the left of each message in the list of tweets and his or her name is displayed above the message. Links are underlined and are clickable in the message itself, and will open in the browser.
If you click on the icon next to tweets, the context menu will open. From here you can respond to the tweet, quote it, add to favourites or re-send.
If there is a picture in the post, it will be displayed as a ‘mini’ picture in the list. This is a pretty cool feature, but unfortunately not really usable on the older devices (with screen resolution below WVGA), as photo thumbnails are too small and hard to see.
You can enable positioning function and include GPS coordinates in your tweets. If you do that, your followers and friends will be able to check your location on Google Maps. To enable this feature, you simply need to press a button that is located above the new tweet field.
I won’t bore you with explanations of all options available in the application, and will get straight to the conclusion. Firstly, the official twitter client is very simple and intuitive. It offers all basic settings such as different notification types, support of picture and URL shortening services, and tweet lists and feeds are called exactly as they should. That is, if you open mentions, you will see the list of messages mentioning your nickname (for example @droidnet). Secondly, this client looks very nice, not fashionable, not creative, etc., but easy and clean.
Strangely enough, but these are the main disadvantages of the client. The main distinguishing features include the abovementioned option to view photos directly in messages, and … that’s it. There is no option to assign different colours to users as in Touiteur or Twicca; no colourful interface and tweet separation to personal and others, as in TweetCaster; no minimalist interface and forethought of Seesmic; and no advanced functionality, which is offered in Twidroid. In short, the official twitter client does not have that key feature, thanks to which some of us choose Seesmic as the main client, while others prefer Twidroid or Twicca. And I’m afraid that this well-built and nice application, made with all the rules of logic and common sense, will just get lost among the competitors, because the company was too late to enter the market.
Below is a video review of the official Twitter client for Android:
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