Twitter for iPhone
Category: Social Networking
Last Updated: May 18th, 2010
Current Version: 3.0 (Previously Tweetie 2)
Size: 2.4 MB
Price: Free

Once upon a time there was a @Twitter client for the iPhone named Tweetie. Although it was not a free client like some of it’s stiffer competition (Read: @Twitterrific), Tweetie was generally considered the best Twitter app available for the iPhone. Then, on April 9th, 2010, Twitter itself announced that had purchased the parent company of Tweetie and would be updating the iPhone client, re-releasing it as “Twitter for iPhone”, and dropping the price all the way down to the low low price of free.

This brings us to today, where the first and only official Twitter client has been unleashed on the world. I never used Tweetie, so I can’t really say if the differences between Tweetie 2 and Twitter for iPhone are big changes or even if there are any changes other than the name and icon, but I have been using Twitterrific, so that is my baseline of comparison. With that in mind, the new Twitter client is awesome.

Virtually anything that you can do on the web via Twitter’s website is integrated in to the client. The client goes even beyond that, though. The interface is extremely clean and easy to navigate and understand. The pull-down to refresh method integrated in the client is my personal favorite way of doing it. You can easily view top tweets, popular tweeters, view maps of localized tweets, and just about anything else you might want. You can even edit virtually every part of your profile with the exception of the web design options. If that’s not enough for you, then try swiping across a tweet. It gives you instant easy access to retweet, set it as a favorite, reply, view the tweeter’s profile, and more.

Sounds awesome, right? Well, it is, but it isn’t quite perfect. Ok, so functionally it is pretty close, but visually it is frankly a bit bland. This is where Twitter could really take a page out of the Twitterrific playbook. Twitterrific has an absolutely fantastic look two it and even offers three different style options, whereas the official Twitter app is visually the closest to Twitterrific’s most basic and likely least used style. I’m not asking for them to have a graphic designer spend the next month working full time on revamp of the App’s visual style, but spicing it up a bit wouldn’t hurt.

Despite a few flaws, if you have an iPhone and use Twitter, this is a must have. There really isn’t another free client available that offers everything that Twitter for iPhone does and you wouldn’t want to pay for something you can get for free.