Seesmic Finally Makes Twitter Usable on Android
By: Hillel Fuld
Android still has not reached puberty. This is true for so many reasons starting with frequent bugs and crashes and ending with a relatively small App Market compared to its competitors. Not to mention the fact that there is no single app to take screen shots on an Android phone, something I learned the hard way during this review. However, for me, one of the main reasons I could not use an Android phone as my primary mobile device is a serious lack of quality Twitter apps.
Now, let me just clarify, that this was my conclusion a month ago, and when I downloaded some of the new applications a few days ago, they were catching up fast, but still not there. Whether or not the iPhone/Android comparison is a fair one, can we agree that comparing the usability of a Twitter app on the iPhone platform to that of a Twitter app on Android is a fair comparison? Well, there is no comparing.
Whether you take Echofon, Tweetie, Tweetings, Twittelator Pro, or any other iPhone Twitter app as your case study, there was no Android app that even came close in terms of user experience, until yesterday. Seesmic, the makers of the famous Web and Windows Twitter app released a new and improved version of their Android app, and let me tell you, it is a game changer.
The interface is clean and nice with one major advantage over almost all Android apps I have tried out, big icons. I am not sure why this is not the first thing Android developers put on their to do list, but it is important, and something Apple implements to perfection. Along the top of the UI, you have four large icons for Timeline, Replies, DMs, and Profile. Under that, there is a nice size Refresh button, which is also very useful. When pressing on a tweet, you are brought to another screen, where you can see the In Reply to button, which displays the thread. There are also three buttons along the bottom for replying, retweeting, or DMing the sender. If you click on the person’s name, you are automatically redirected to their profile, something that might seem obvious but is missing from many apps I have reviewed.
Then there is the Options button. When you press the phone’s options button, there are some more important features that make this app the platform’s best Twitter app. There is a Refresh button, a Compose button to send a tweet, a Search function, and then it gets interesting. The next button in the Options menu is Lists. Yes, Seesmic for Android now includes Twitter Lists, and it does it beautifully.
When you press the Lists button, you are brought to a new screen with two big tabs along the top, You Follow and Follow You. You can select which lists you want to choose from, and as soon as you make that selection, you can choose which list you want to view. The entire List implementation in Seesmic for Android is unparalleled in my opinion, and yes, I mean on all mobile platforms, at least the ones I have tried.
Other awesome Seesmic features include video and photo sharing straight from your phone, URL shortener, location sharing, background notifications, saving tweets as drafts, threaded DMs (huge!!), and a whole lot more. For me, the big winning factor for this app is not its list of features, which is quite long, but rather, its highly intuitive and user friendly interface. Seesmic has finally managed to make Twitter usable on the Android platform.
Our Rating: 4/5
Developer: Seesmic
