Tweetie review

Twitter applications for the iPhone are ten a penny – and there are many free options. So why should you consider paying for Tweetie? Put simply, Tweetie is the gold standard of Twitter clients on the iPhone at present.

It combines a rich set of features with speed and a simple interface, which makes it an excellent choice for the power-Twitter user.
It’s so good – and I’m such a Twitter addict – that it’s found a permanent place on the bottom bar of my iPhone.

The main interface is clean and simple to use, with a list of the most recent tweets from your friends. It supports multiple accounts, so if you use Twitter for both home and work, you can post to either account. There’s a main button bar along the bottom that gives you quick access to your friends, direct messages, and any replies to you.

Many of the more interesting features, though, are hidden behind the “More” button. This gives you access to the powerful Twitter search engine, as well as tweets from any users nearby. You can also view Trends, which lets you quickly and easily find topics that lots of people are talking about.

One particularly nice feature is integration with Instapaper, a web service which lets you save the text from a web page for later reading, and which has its own very nice iPhone application. Any link that appears in a tweet can be clipped to Instapaper from within Tweetie, which makes it a great way of saving interesting-looking links that your friends send around.

Many of these features are offered by other applications, and some other applications – such as Twitterlator – have all of them. But what makes Tweetie a winner is that all of the features are quick and easy to get to. There’s nothing complex about accessing even the more powerful features – and that’s what makes it my current pick of the bunch.