Technology Blog

Let's start off with a quick introduction to each of the Twitter clients that we'll be comparing, but do bear with us while we give the newcomer a slightly longer rundown:

Twitter for Android
Knowing that the successful Tweetie 2 for iPhone is now under Twitter Inc.'s wing, we naturally had high hopes for Twitter's very own app for Android (2.1 and beyond, specifically). Sadly, it wasn't a good start -- every time the app launches, you're greeted by the menu (pictured above) instead of the timeline; alas, there's no option to pick the latter, but you can sort of solve this by launching from the widgets instead. We also find it slightly cumbersome to switch between the general feed, mentions and favorites timelines -- there are no permanent timeline tabs on the screen as offered by most other apps, so you'd have to tap on the top-left icon or go back to the menu for the other timelines.

Another complaint we have is the inconsistency of the retweet feature -- for some reason the retweet button's missing in the "By others" retweet timeline, mentions timeline, nearby tweets timeline or search results; the other apps have no such limitation. We're not exactly sure what the logic behind this is, but what's certain is that it's a nuisance and restricts our way of tweeting -- "retweet" was actually a format created by the Twitter community, after all. Hopefully we'll see a fix for this soon.

Leaving our retweet rant aside, there's one cool feature that we dig -- picture thumbnails in timelines. For now, only TwitPic and yfrog pictures can be previewed this way, but we won't be surprised if more supported sites are to come soon. Another nice and unique addition is the deep OS integration -- as pictured above, your contacts will be associated with their Twitter accounts by the power of green bot magic, plus you can have a glance at their latest tweets in your address book.