My Favorite Free Windows Phone Twitter App
- by Tim Murphy
Windows Phone 7 has been out for about two years now. In that time I have switched back and forth with different free Twitter apps. Mostly the has been because someone has mentioned one or another that they like. I figured I would give a quick run down of what I felt were the pros and cons of each. These are only the ones that I have used and your mileage may vary. So here we go. WP7 Built-In Twitter Functionality While it is great that Microsoft put this functionality in, it is extremely limited in usefulness. Some apps leverage it to allow you to share pictures or information they contain. In all though, I don’t use it unless it is the quickest way to get something out. Official Twitter App The official Twitter app isn’t a very big step up from the phone functionality. It gives you a better timeline view and better attachment handling, but it makes you bounce to a browser page to see images that are linked to a tweet. TweetCaster This was my main Twitter app for quite a while. It is the only one with InstaPaper integration so that you can save you a tweet and review it later. My main problem is that it crashes too much when it can’t find a connection. It also only previews yfrog and twitpic images and only once you go to the detail of a tweet. Other than that it is a solid Twitter client. moTweets This is my current favorite. It has nice image display in your timeline which I have not seen on any of the other apps. There are two modes that you can use with this app. The first is standard to most Twitter apps that allows you to navigate to a tweet and do the usual operations. The second is what they call Quick Buttons. In this case you do not see the content of the tweet but go straight to the let’s get something done stage. It is an interesting take. I do miss the Instapaper integration and it has a tendency to show a blank timeline list once in a while after you view detail entry. If you scroll the list it restore your timeline, but you lose you place and are put to the first entry. Seesmic I am not very fond of this app. The first thing is that it makes you pick a “Space” when you enter the app. This is really “which account do you want to see”. On top of that it does not show who retweeted an entry in your timeline and then only tells you how many people RT the post when you look at the detail. There is a Speak feature that will read you a single tweet, but you have to navigate to the tweet and then to a menu to make it work. We will have to see if this gets better with the features in Windows Phone 8. Other than that it is another basic feature app. Summary In the end I am sticking with moTweets. I would appreciate it if they added the Instapaper capability and fixed the one bug. If they did that I would be really happy with the product. del.icio.us Tags: Twitter,Windows Phone 7,WP7,TweetCaster,moTweets,Seesmic
