8 Nifty Twitter Mobile Clients

For any Twitter newbie, it can be a very daunting task when you first start twittering to figure out which Twitter client of the numerous others is appropriate for a specific mobile platform.  You quickly discover that it is hard to find a way to follow all of your Twitter updates without being interrupted constantly by a flow of updates. While you can update your status via SMS, keeping track of your friends and followers is difficult to do particularly while you are on the go.  Due to the huge success of the iPhone launch, there is no shortage of the number of Twitter clients out there on the iPhone or even other emerging platforms such as Android.  Below is a concised list of the more popular mobile Twitter applications listed by platform.

1. Tiny Twitter (Java-enabled phones, Windows Mobile, Blackberry platform)                          
2. TwitterBerry (Blackberry)
3. CeTwit (Windows Mobile)
4. Twitteresce (Java-enabled phones)
5. Twibble (Java-enabled phones)
6. Twinkle (iPhone)
7. Twidroid (Google Android G1)
8. Tweetie (iPhone)

Tiny Twitter is a twitter client for Java-enabled, Windows Mobile and Blackberry phones.

Features:

• Set automatic update interval
• Click update from [menu] to fetch friends timeline
• Send tweets/direct message
• Hide friends temporarily
• Collapse tweets, hide user's image and truncate text to get more real estate
• Retrieve direct message

Overall: good for mass-market phones, but other Twitter clients have better UI (see below)

Twitterberry is a mobile Twitter client for posting updates for the Blackberry platform.

Features:

• Pictures support via TwitPic
• ping.fm support
• Timeline updates while device is sleeping
• Audible/vibrate alerts
• Retweet
• Favorite
• Delete
• Picture support via TwitPic.com
• Refresh timelines
• Configurable auto-updating of timelines
• Longer list of tweets: 200
• View & reply to tweets and direct messages
• Favorite and delete tweets from any timeline
• View friends list
• Allow overflow of 140 characters when typing your tweet
• Optimize menu screen so most commonly used choices are easy to access
• URLs in tweets can be selected and opened in your Blackberry browser
• User customizable default application entry screen
• BES connection support

Overall: best app for Blackberry

CeTwit is a Windows Mobile Twitter client written in C# leveraging the .net compact framework.

Features:

• Timeline display
• Account storage
• Status updates
• Direct Messages
• Click to reply
• Automated refresh
• Smartphone support
• Avatars in timeline
• Local caching of avatars
• Squeezer support
• Relative timestamps
• Follow/unfollow
• Pictures support via TwitPic
• ping.fm support
• Timeline updates while device is sleeping
• Audible/vibrate alerts
• Retweet
• Favorite 
• Delete

Overall: Nicer UI compared to Tiny Twitter and fully featured, except for URL shortening

Twitteresce is a Twitter client for Java-enabled phones with a slick background for text updates.

Features:

• Displays all status updates
• Retrieve and delete tweets & direct messages
• Autoupdate
• Refresh rate

Overall: basic tweeting functionality for Java enabled phones, but lacks several nifty features

Twibble is a location-aware Twitter client that uses GPS on Blackberry Curve 8330 or Symbian phones like Nokia E71 or N95

Features:

• Post Messages
• Auto refresh
• Notifications
• Uploading of photos via TwitPic
• Themes
• Integrated tweets & direct messages displayed in a single list
• Open web URLs within tweets
• Retweet
• Quick @replies
• Follow users
• Mark tweets as favorite
• SSL support
• Cancel network requests
• Location-based (shows location of friends on a map) via GPS

Overall: good for Java-enabled phones or GPS supported phones

Twinkle is an iPhone client that has location aware features.

Features:

• Discover, connect and send messages to people nearby
• Upload photos and update your status on your Twitter account
• Using the power of geolocation, join the discussion with the people around you

Overall: cool UI and looks slick on the iPhone

Twidroid is a Twitter client for the Google Android phone.

Refer to my earlier post on "Top Android Social Networking Applications".

Tweetie is a full featured Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It offers everything you would want from your timeline to trends - all within an incredibly polished user interface, great performance and ease-of-use.

Features:

• Handles multiple Twitter accounts
• View  your timeline, replies and direct messages
• Manage favorites
• Browse friends and followers
• Post new tweets, Retweet
• Reply directly to tweets and send direct messages
• Follow and unfollow people
• Block/unblock users
• Navigate reply chains
• Inline web browser
• Integrated with TwitPic for posting photos
• Update Twitter location
• Post tweets w/auto URL shortener
• Uses secure connection (https)
• View Twitter trends and custom searches
• Nearby searching
• Links to StockTwits
• Optional landscape keyboard
• Themes

There are several other Twitter clients that were developed earlier for the iPhone such as Twitterific, Twitterfon, Twittelator and Twinkle (above).  However, of all of them, my favorite one is Tweetie for the iPhone. Tweetie includes four main buttons: Tweets, Replies, Messages, Favorites.  Under More, you will find My Profile, Following, Followers, Trends and Search.  You can easily view @replies, see URL links directly in the inline browser, retweet messages, turn links in the browser into short URLs and much more. Perhaps, the only thing missing is that it doesn't let you browse the web and shorten a URL on the fly.  Tweetie is definitely a solid app overall and is probably the most full-featured Twitter client available for the iPhone to date.

What is your favorite Twitter mobile client? Please let me know in your comments.  If you found this article interesting, feel free to retweet (upper left corner) and follow me on Twitter.