Best (Free) Mobile Twitter Apps for BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile
Twitter lets you share details on whatever you're doing. But how many truly interesting activities happen in front of a PC? Thanks to these seven mobile Twitter apps for BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile devices, wherever your smartphone goes, Twitter can follow.
Twitter Apps for Multiple Platforms
While the previously mentioned software applications were developed with specific mobile platforms and operating systems in mind, you'll also find a number of quality mobile Twitter apps designed for any Java-enabled devices. Here are two of our favorites.
Tiny Twitter
Tiny Twitter lets you send and receive status updates and messages, as well as check on what your connections are doing. It works on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and other smartphones--in fact; it will function on any Java-enabled device, according to the Tiny Twitter website.
The app gives you access to friends' timelines, personal timelines, replies, direct messages and you can even hide tweets from certain friends. The app can be automatically set to update in intervals of 4 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, every hour, or only manually. And your most recent "tweet" can be set to scroll across the bottom of your screen.
The one essential feature that Tiny Twitter lacks, in our opinion, is a command to view the Public Timeline. And, in our experience, Tiny Twitter doesn't work over Wi-Fi--at least using a BlackBerry 8320.
Twibble
Developed initially to run on Nokia devices with the Symbian operating system, the Twibble mobile Twitter application now works a wide variety of Java-enabled handsets like BlackBerry and Sony Ericsson phones.
Twibble provides the core Twitter functionality--access to timelines, direct messages and replies--and has an auto-update feature that can be used to refresh various feeds, reducing the need to navigate back and forth between screens. Like Twitterific for iPhone, the app can tie GPS location information to tweets and locate others nearby who've done the same.
One caveat for using mobile applications that are meant to function on a variety of platforms and devices: occasionally some features and functionality won't work exactly the way they're intended. For example, we tried Twibble on a BlackBerry and found its menu-based navigation to be a bit frustrating; you often need to click through a number of screens just to access basic functionality. A set of numeric and keyboard shortcuts is available to reduce the time it takes to reach certain screens, but we'd prefer a cleaner, simpler UI.
Like all the other apps mentioned in this article, Twibble is free.
Did we leave out a great mobile Twitter app? Well, nobody's perfect...If you know of another mobile Twitter application that's worth mentioning, drop us a comment below and we'll be sure to check it out.
