Twitter clients for the Google G1 and Android mobile smartphones
Written by Glenn Letham (@gletham)
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
I’m currently using the G1 as my main/only mobile device - it’s a
perfect time for such a challenge because I’m also traveling and away
from the home office so there are always hiccups and glitches that can
occur under such circumstances - a perfect time for a test!
When on the road, one of the most important things for mobile geeks to do is stay in touch and connected with social media outlets - this actually is not a tough thing to do because Twitter is such a fine app and is relatively simple to stay in touch with thanks to the many ways available to twitter. So how can I twitter ala G1?
First and foremost, there’s always simple text messaging (although that’s a bit dull). Twitter enables users to link their account to a mobile phone number, thus providing users with a connection between cell phone and twitter account simply via text message – this one is a no-brainer and a fail-safe, however, there’s also a number of fine third-party apps available as well… so, which one to use?? Read on for some comments on several Twitter clients for the Android mobile OS.
Twitdroid – http://twidroid.com/
This is perhaps the most popular Twitter app from the Android market. Calling up the app on the mobile reveals a familiar look (much like what you get on the web) with tweets appearing besides the author’s photo and being constantly updated and streamed to your mobile. A button is available to easily view @replies or direct messages you may have received. Overall, the app is very functional and likely one of the best, however, it’s far from perfect. With much use I did seem to encounter numerous shut downs and application crashes – quite annoying really. Simple tweeting is no issue; however, I found hitting the reply button was often non-reactive (annoying!). The best features of the app are the ability to post your geographic location by hitting menu then the “geo” option. This pulls up a coordinate via GPS and then a map url is pasted into your tweet enabling a pretty cool “I am here” capability. The app also provides a photo button for embedding pictures as well as ability to use indentica as well. Ideally I’d like this function to also call up the camera app on the device but instead it pulls up a gallery of images and is not really very intuitive in my mind. You can select a photo from the gallery then upload and tweet (watch out for data charges) this is somewhat handy, however, again this could be made better perhaps by integrating some settings to post to flickr in addition to Twitpic and Phodroid. Twitdroid is very useful but still has some room for improvement.
Twitdroid
Twit2Gohttp://twit2go.com/ is another Twitter client from the Android market. I found the app slow to load for the first time although that is corrected after a bit of use. First and foremost I had to ask myself how the heck do I tweet? Not a good starting point for a twitter client I would say… I mean come on, give me a twitter dialog bar where I enter text for my tweets (head scratching) – after searching a bit one will find it under the menu option. Upon launching the app you see all the tweets in a familiar manner, easily scrollable with most recent at the top. Under the menu options you can view you @replies and RTs. To reply to a tweet or RT (re-tweet) simply touch a tweet and hold for a second or 2 – this invokes a menu to pop up (options include reply, DM, see user profile, or RT) this is nice but how do you send a plain old tweet?? OK… here it is, to tweet you simply hit the menu button and select “update: then you have a box for text input and a user-friendly url shortener is provided. The best features of this app though are the inclusion of “take a picture” or “add a picture from gallery, the selected photo is then attached to your tweet and sent to twitpic – nice! Overall this is an excellent application, perhaps one of the best Android Twitter client I’ve used.
Twit2Go
Droid Twitter – this app takes a totally different approach by presenting front and center a twitter text box for typing your tweet – you don’t view all the recent tweets from contacts when loaded… a bit odd! The app is also supported by ads so yet get a big annoying ad from admob on the bottom of the screen. Beyond this I can’t really say much except maybe to save you time and don’t even bother downloading this app – quite frankly it sucks and don’t waste your bandwidth downloading this one!
Twitli is another fine client, although it looks and feels very similar to twitdroid. A “tweet” bar is presented on the top of the navigation and tweets are listed below exactly like they are in twitdroid. Using it is simple and access to @replies and direct messages is found by hitting the menu button. Perhaps the nicest addition to the functionality is the ability to add a photo. From the menu options select the camera icon, this calls up the camera app and you can then snap a photo – unfortunately testing this caused the app to crash in my demo… oops! Overall, it’s ok, a bit slow, and very basic functionality is provided.
Twittahttp://code.google.com/p/twitta/ has a very nice UI with frames, your latest twitter streams are listed on top while a dialog for tweeting is presented on the bottom of the page – nice. Menu options are very basic, with settings and an option to direct message someone is provided – really, a Direct message function like this is useless I find as it would make much more sense to be able to read someone’s tweet in the timeline bar and then click on their message to either reply or DM them – why can’t developers figure this one out?? Twitta is quite basic and as of now I really can’t see any compelling reason why I would use it.
Comments:
Overall, most of the Android twitter apps I’ve seen are quite basic. Some have some decent functionality and features although not one seems to provide everything. For me, I’m looking for (at a minimum) the following in my mobile twitter client: fast access to send tweets, a logical and fast way to @ reply or DM someone regarding their message; the ability to follow or un-follow someone; URL shortening; access to twitter search (nobody seems to provide this; posting a photo via photo capture or send from gallery and also send to twitpic and flickr with a tweet; ability to add geo location information like “I am here” - of note, there’s a fine android app called “I am here” which would really rock if it integrated with Twitter and provided ability to include a photo. Not one app that I tested seemed to have everything needed, although TwitDroid comes the closest. For now it seems that using a web browser to Twitter and using Dabr (see http://dabr.co.uk/ or @dabr) from a mobile is still likely the fastest and simplest way to Twitter from a G1 if you don’t feel like messing around with applications that are still buggy.
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