iPhone Gems: The Complete Guide to All 33 Twitter Apps

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iPhone Gems: The Complete Guide to All 33 Twitter Apps

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iTweets ($1) is an extremely basic, no-frills Twitter client that does little more than display your current Twitter timeline and allow you to post your own Tweets. Entries in your Twitter timeline are displayed in iChat-style speech bubbles, with replies and direct messages color-coded to distinguish them from normal tweets.

Tweets containing links have a small arrow to the right. Tapping on these tweets will open in iTweets’ built-in browser, which provides no functionality other than page-viewing—an option to open links in Safari is conspicuously absent here.

Double-tapping on a tweet will automatically post a reply to that tweet, or you can post a new tweet by tapping on the text field at the bottom of the screen. The tweet entry field is a single-line text field with no other features or even a character count to track how much text you have entered—you can easily go well over Twitter’s 140-character limit without any kind of warning from iTweets, and any extra characters are simply unceremoniously discarded by Twitter when you actually post the tweet.

iTweets provides a basic, application-based settings screen which allows you to change your Twitter account information and enable or disable sound or vibration notifications of new tweets. You can also enable a feature to refresh your tweets by shaking the iPhone. iTweets also has a settings page within the iPhone or iPod touch Settings app that allows you to adjust several more advanced settings, such as auto-fetch font size and the colors used by different categories of tweets.

iTweets is an extremely basic Twitter application with nothing special to recommend it. While its simple and clean interface may appeal to some, there are slightly more sophisticated free options available, so it’s hard to imagine spending even $1 for this app. iLounge Rating: C-.

Tweeter from Takuma Mori

Tweeter is an app that exists solely for the purpose of making posts to Twitter. It provides no ability to view any information from Twitter; it simply opens with a text entry dialog box for you to enter text to post as a tweet.

Other than a character count, Tweeter provides no other posting features such as updating your location or posting photos. A config screen is available to change your Twitter account, switch to a dark color theme or enter a footer to be appended to the bottom of each tweet, but that’s about it. Even for free, this app seems like a waste. iLounge Rating: C-.

Twitfire from Eric Allam

Twitfire is also designed solely for posting to Twitter, but offers a few additional features over Tweeter, including the ability to post photo links from either your camera or your saved photos, update your location or post a map link, look up your Twitter friends to reference them or post a reply to them, and even search for an insert links from within the app itself.

The ability to search for and post links from within the app is a somewhat unique feature. An integrated browser is presented with a search dialog box for you to search Google for the page you’re looking for, and once you are viewing the appropriate page, you can tap the plus button at the bottom-right corner to add the link. Links are pasted in at the current cursor position, shortened with the “is.gd” URL shortening service to save character space.

In our view, it makes more sense to be able to post a link that you are already looking at in Mobile Safari than to have to search it out again, rendering this feature interesting but not exactly convenient. Combined with the fact that this client does considerably less than more full-featured free Twitter clients, this app falls into the same general category as Tweeter, although it at least provides more than just basic posting features. iLounge Rating: C.

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Comments

1

Nice to see my app of choice twitterfon being highly recommended by ilounge

Posted by Alicia Bankhofer on February 25, 2009 at 3:11 PM (PDT)

2

I disagree. No way does Twitterrific Pro get a D. It’s missing some advanced features and doesn’t filter replies. BUT it’s the best app for straightup reading and occasional replies - both UI and stability. Tweetie crashed on me today and also posted a tweet before I finished typing it. Never have I had that happen in Twitterrific Pro. (My top three are those two and Twitterfon.)

There are actually more apps than just these for accessing Twitter. This looks to be a list of *deicated* Twitter apps.

Posted by DaveZatz on February 25, 2009 at 5:28 PM (PDT)

3

I wish the ratings didn’t take the price tag of the apps into consideration, something they obviously do here.

Either that, or break down each app’s rating into the various criteria provided.

I’d be happy to pay up to $50 for an app whose user interface, user friendliness, and feature repertoire all score A+, than for a $1 app that has fewer features, poorer UI, and lacks in user friendliness.

Don’t rate the price. Just rate the rest, and leave it up to the individual consumer to decide whether the price tag is worth it or not.

Posted by Finnyboy on February 26, 2009 at 6:24 PM (PDT)

4

#3, we give the price the weight we feel it deserves. No one is paying $50 for iPhone apps, and we have no interest in seeing that change by ignoring the importance of price relative to the performance of apps we review. In other words, feel free to re-rate the products for yourself based on the rest of the information provided, and whatever your own criteria may be for balancing their weight.

Posted by Jeremy Horwitz in East Amherst, NY, USA on February 26, 2009 at 7:50 PM (PDT)

5

Tried a few mentioned here, settled on TwitterFon, more feature rich than it seems on the surface, particularly like the GeoLocation search feature.

Posted by Dave Fowler on February 27, 2009 at 3:08 AM (PDT)

6

With regards to the pricing considerations in the ratings, bear in mind that if we really did find a $10 app that did sufficiently more than a $1 app, the ratings would definitely reflect that. However, when you have a more expensive app that does nothing more than the free options that are available, this is reflected in the rating as well.

For example, both Tweetie and Twitterfon received the same very high rating, despite Twitterfon being free, since Tweetie delivers value for its $3 price tag.

On the other hand, Twitterrific Premium received a D simply because it delivers nothing for its steep price, particularly considering the developer also offers a nearly-identical ad-supported free version. If you like Twitterrific enough that you want to buy the Premium version as a “donation” to the developer, them by all means feel free to do so, but we can’t in good faith state that the app provides good value for your money in comparison to the rest of the options out there.

To put it another way: The higher the price tag of an app, the more we expect from it. Our ratings reflect where apps fail to meet those expectations.

Posted by Jesse Hollington in Toronto on February 27, 2009 at 4:41 AM (PDT)

7

I use both tweetie and twitterfon and I am curious about something.

Does twitterfon support multiple accounts?

I didn’t see it in the review and no place online says it.

does anyone know?

Posted by Mike Coogan on March 13, 2009 at 8:43 PM (PDT)

8

I have only used TwitterFon so I don’t know if the rest have this problem… but it crashes easily (especially with links to some particular sites like the Wall Street Journal tweets). It would be great if it didn’t crash. I guess for the price though I shouldn’t complain because otherwise it is an excellent app. But for the crashing issue it well deserves that high rating.

Posted by Rufus on March 24, 2009 at 7:07 AM (PDT)

9

This great review is in desperate need of a refresh…Twittelator and Twitterrific are both at version 2.0…Twitterrific with a huge price drop as well. Meanwhile, Tweetie and TwitterFon haven’t changed, while Twittelator offers more options than any other iPhone Twitter app, and Twitteriffic’s updates now make it equal or better than TwitterFon or Tweetie, in my opinion.

Let’s have a Part 2 update of this review. It was a good one!

Posted by Doctor on May 20, 2009 at 8:22 PM (PDT)

10

Agree with #9 go for part2 of this review, not only a lot of upgrades, also new very interesting apps like Landscape Twitting!

Posted by Kigonjiro on July 22, 2009 at 1:48 PM (PDT)

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