Twitter client for Windows Mobile

Anyone who has been paying attention to my blog will have noticed that I like my Twitter and that I use a Windows Mobile phone (the SonyEricsson Xperia X1). I've tried a bunch of Twitter clients for my current and previous handsets and frankly it's been a case of picking the best of a bad bunch. Now that I've had two people mention it to me, I'm giving a new client a try: Twikini.

I'll admit that first time I visited the Twikini site I turned away without actually looking at the product because it wasn't free and the other clients I'd been using were. On second thoughts, that was a rather hasty decision for a number of reasons:

• The other Windows Mobile clients for Twitter may be free, but they're either rubbish, or lacking multiple features, or both!
• If pressed to put a value on mobile Twitter access, I would have to say that it's worth far more to me than nothing. We may have been conditioned in recent years to expect not to pay to use web services, but if something's worth having, it's worth paying for.
• I already paid for Tweetie for the iPod Touch, which (although it's fabulous) is arguably less useful since I can only use it somewhere I have wifi access (home/office/etc).

At the moment, I'm using Twikini's free 14 day trial and while I'm not in a position to give it a thorough review, I already like several things about it:

• The quick access to reply (left on the d-pad) and retweet (right on the d-pad) options  from the timeline is handy.
• Retweets are sent in my preferred style, i.e. RT @username: tweet
• While the editor for sending a tweet won't let you go over Twitter's 140 character limit, when you're retweeting a long tweet it doesn't chop it off at 140 and cause you to lose useful information like some clients! It gives you >140 characters and allows you to edit it down to size yourself.
• You can surf through users linked in tweets and get to their recent tweets.
• From the menu there's a tools option to go straight to a specific user's profile. That's sadly lacking from some clients.
• The overall look and feel of it is good, and it does seem to be quicker in use than most clients I've tried.

There's some room for improvement though:

• Tweets are displayed with fixed height in the timeline, which looks good but isn't enough space for 140 characters, so for a longer tweet you have to click into it to see it all. I don't think it's much to ask to be able to see all of each 140 character (or less) tweet.
• When you go through a user's profile to their list of recent tweets, you don't have the same quick options to reply/retweet as on the main timeline (it is possible to do either by clicking into a tweet, but it would be nice to just hit left or right).
• When you're looking at a user's profile and open the menu, the top (default) option is Stop Following. I could see that resulting in some accidental un-follows and would prefer it to be @reply.
• In the current version (1.1) there's no sign of Twitter search (which is a great feature of Tweetie).
• I want a notification option to play a sound when I receive a reply or direct message, not just the option for any new tweet - there are always new tweets! Ideally I'd like to see it use WinMo's notification system too.

So overall I'd have to say that I've had a positive start to my use of Twikini. If you're not entirely happy with your existing Twitter client on Windows Mobile (and I'm guessing you're not!) then I'd certainly suggest taking up the 2 week trial.

Comments

[Jonathan Medd]

Great post, I may need to use this soon.

BTW, exactly how many babe tweets are you following?!

[jonoble]

That's not my Twitter timeline - the screenshots are from the Twikini site. ;-)