Mobile app review: Tweetdeck for iPhone

Posted 17 June 2009 10:52am by Graham Charlton with 11 comments

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I've just downloaded the newly released Tweetdeck for iPhone, which contains all the features of the desktop version, currently the best way to organise your Twitter activity.

Having used Twitterific for mobile tweeting before, I have been using Tweetie lately, but will Tweetdeck for iPhone convince me to abandon it?

For starters, Tweetdeck for iPhone is free of charge, compared to the £2.99 it costs to download Tweetie. This won't break the bank, but when there's a free Twitter app with the same functionality, Tweetie's developers must be worried.

The app is organised in much the same way as the desktop client, initially with three columns for all friends, DMs, and replies. You can move the columns along with your finger and click on a column to focus on it:

Clicking on any tweet will give you the detail, and provides options to click on links, reply send a DM to that user, or retweet it:

If you click on a link in a Tweet, it opens up within the app, but allows you to zoom in to read the text more easily. This is preferable to opening links in the phone's browser, making it easier to get back to the main Tweetdeck screen:

Retweeting and replying is easier on the Tweetdeck app too; it could be done on Tweetie but takes one less click to achieve:

Like the desktop version, it's a great reputation monitoring tool, and it's easy to set up a search for a particular keyword or phrase, or add a user group: 

This just adds a new column, which can all be moved left or right as you prefer: 

Perhaps I pressed the refresh button (you can also set it to refresh when you shake the phone) too often when trying out the app as I reached the API limit of 100 'calls' per hour, though I don't think I refreshed 100 times.

This means I have to wait for the next hour for it to reset, which could become annoying, though you can at least monitor this at the top of the screen to avoid this issue:

Tweetdeck for iPhone is excellent, easy to use, and has managed to translate most of the functionality of the desktop client onto the mobile app.

There's a feature comparison of Tweetdeck and Tweetie on Mashable, which concludes that Tweetdeck is the one to choose, and it's hard to disagree with that conclusion.

Tweetdeck for iPhone provides an attractive user interface, and is fast, full of useful features, and completely free of charge. The initial feedback about the app on Twitter seems pretty positive too. Definitely worth downloading.