Twitter is a web service which helps you to communicate and stay connected through quick exchange of messages. Its supposedly one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Internet.
Until few days back, accessing Twitter service from iPhone was possible only via the safari web browser. Following are the 4 web based Twitter Clients for iPhone:
Twitter Mobile
Twitter Mobile is the official version of the mobile client. The User interface is basic (hence loads faster) and it lacks a lot of features available on normal web based client.
The following snapshot shows the only 4 options available on the mobile client.
Pocket Tweets
The user interface of PocketTweets is pretty good with buddy icons and the available timelines. However the good looking interface took a toll on the loading speed. It was amazingly slow even when I used the client over Wi-Fi
Hahlo
Hahlo has a much better user interface compared to PocketTweets and it also loaded up pretty fast. The home page is kind of not that user friendly and would have liked if it could directly showed the friends timeline.
iTweet
iTweet has all the features but not the right user interface. I found it too difficult to use; only a few tweets are displayed and the application menu itself took a lot of space on the screen.
Following are the 2 native twitter clients available for iPhone:
Mobile Twitter
MobileTwitter is a native twitter applications developed by Nicholas Pike and is available on the STE source. The native client loaded the tweets pretty fast and unlike the web clients you don’t have to enter the login credentials again and again.
The only issue with this client is the positioning of the options menu with respect to the iPhone keyboard which pops up while posting a tweet. Many a times I ended up clicking on an option rather than typing a character !
Features:
- Your timeline (you + those you follow)
- Direct messages
- Replies
- Everyone
- Updating your Twitter status
- Reply directly to tweets from MobileTwitter
- Open Tweets in MobileSafari (handy for clicking on links..)
- Direct message authors of tweets
- TwitPic.com integration
- Manual refresh
Twinkle
Twinkle is very similar to MobileTwitter in terms of features and User interface. One interesting feature in Twinkle is the “Location” feature using which you can check on the tweets posted by people near to you. If you don’t find any tweets you can always change the distance 🙂
If you know of any other Twitter client for iPhone, please suggest the same via the comment form.
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I don’t have an iPhone….yet 🙁
If you are planning to buy one, please do wait till July 🙂
I am wondering how your tweets were not shown on Twinkle when I selected the “Near Me” feature !!
I’m currently working on an updated version of Hahlo that will introduce a whole bunch of new features and improvements , one of which is the a setting allowing users to choose their own ‘home’ page, so they can choose have it load directly to the friends timeline, replies, messages etc.
Dean, Thanks for stopping by.
The feature of users selecting their home page should probably make Hahlo the best non-native twitter client for iPhone.
i just gave twinkle a try …
its looks better than hahlo … but i kinda like hahlo as it loads faster …
i wonder if i can make it an app then a webclip on my screen …
hmmm …
subcorpus,
yeah hahlo is pretty good except a few issues for which the application author has confirmed that there is a fix coming out soon 🙂