Courtesy: flickr echo_1123

On the tail of my recommendations for desktop twitter clients I thought I’d tell you about my experience with iPhone twitter clients.  I’ve tried half a dozen or so but in this space I think there is a really clear winner.  Unlike the desktop applications (that are all free) the iPhone applications are going to cost a cup of coffee.

Tweetie 2

Website: www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/

Tweetie is by far my favorite iPhone twitter application.  In the past tweetie lived as a version 1 application and broke the mold a little on the iTunes app store by choosing to charge people to buy the new version of the app – in all honesty though it’s worth it.

• API Support – Tweetie has extensive support of all of the functions you would expect to find on the twitter website including following and unfollowing people, searches, list management and favorites.
• 3rd Party Apps – I haven’t seen another application come close in it’s support of 3rd party twitter services.  To name just a few: bit.ly, instapaper, yfrog, Follow cost and Tweet blocker.  It even has the ability to configure your own providers for things like image sharing and link sharing, I did this successfully with ejnr.com – my own link sharing web service.  I love the integration to instapaper!
• Local Tweets – The app has great integration to finding tweets in your vicinity with a cool little radar animation while it searches for people tweeting around you.
• Saved Searches – This let’s you save a search you might do regularly and then re-run it at a later time.
• Swipe shortcuts – There are a bunch of swipe based quick tasks in the app – like the ability to swipe a tweet that has a link and then rapidly send the link to instaper for later consumption.

The app is AUD$3.99 and well worth the investment, if you’re looking for a quick win then look no further.

Hootsuite

Website: www.hootsuite.com/iphone

A recent entrant into the iPhone app market, this is a port of the popular web based twitter client to the iPhone.  The main advantage to using this app would be if you are already wedded to hootsuite on the desktop.  It synchronises your configurations from the web to the iPhone which can be a great timesaver, however I’ve found that with the introduction of twitter lists this sort of synch’ing is only of marginal value.

The app is free however – so if you’re looking at price then this would be my choise.

Tweetdeck

Website: www.tweetdeck.com/iphone

Tweetdeck could have been a contender is this race however I think the developers attempted to perhaps bring too much of the ‘column style’ approach to the platform.  The iPhone screen real estate just isn’t well suited to this, and in attempting this mamoth task unfortunately created a very heavy application that doesn’t perform well.  Additionally they also ported the colour scheme across – which I know is only a small issue (and you can no doubt change it) but the black is just really heavy on the small screen.

The winner is by far Tweetie 2.