Microblogging phenom Twitter and the iPhone would seem to go together like ice and tea on a hot summer day—so much so that I’m tempted to dub Apple’s handset the “Twitterphone.” And while you can use Twitter’s own website via Safari or the iPhone’s SMS functionality to inform all of your friends what you are up to at this very second, the former isn’t really designed for the iPhone, and the latter can eat into your free 200 messages pretty quick.
The solution? Web apps, my dear Watson. Two popular apps have quickly distinguished themselves as the places to go for iTwittering: Hahlo and PocketTweets. But oh, how to choose which one to keep everybody apprised of the delicious sandwich you just ate?
I took a look at both apps and conjured up some thoughts. If Twitter be the stuff of life for you, read on.
Both make it easy to do the basics of Twittering: viewing your friends’ messages and sending in your own tweets. I found PocketTweets slightly more intuitive for entering your own tweets, since it’s much clearer which button you push to update (it’s marked, logically, “Update”; Hahlo’s has a star icon, which I initially thought was for designating a favorite).
Both Hahlo and PocketTweets let you view your friends’ timeline, the public timeline, direct messages, or an archive of your own posts, though both put all these controls at the bottom of the page, which can take some time to scroll to, depending on what mode you’re in (neither of them let you specify how many tweets are displayed).
PocketTweets lets you mark a tweet as a favorite, functionality that Hahlo currently lacks, but Hahlo takes a slight edge by also letting you view a list of people who have replied to you, using the @[username] convention and by actually letting you send direct messages (hit the Messages button at the bottom and then hit the update button; it’ll give you a dropdown menu of people you can send a message to). Neither, however, will alert you when you receive a new direct message, meaning you have to either check it regularly, or watch your email.
For updating, both present you with a dialog box into which you can type using the iPhone’s virtual keyboard. Though both claim to give you a character count (Twitter limits updates to 140), Hahlo’s doesn’t work at all, while PocketTweets doesn’t give you the correct number until you’ve dismissed the onscreen keyboard by tapping “Done.” In my tests, I also couldn’t get the magnifying loupe to display in either text entry field, though this may be a limitation of the iPhone itself—moral of the story: don’t make typos. And while you can type using the landscape keyboard in Safari, because of the cramped design, it limits the amount of space you have to see what you’re typing.
As far as performance goes, I found that PocketTweets seemed a little quicker on the update, often showing me more recent messages than Hahlo (it may poll for updates more frequently). Both load very quickly over the Wi-Fi connection, but Hahlo’s simpler design comes up speedier when you’re using EDGE.
There’s no question that both are better options than SMS or Twitter’s own website. Are they better than a dedicated app on the iPhone? Impossible to say at this point, though since they’re websites, they lack niceties like being able to alert you when you receive a new tweet (without having to load up the website, that is). Which one you use will largely depend on what functionality you demand from your Twitter client: if sending direct messages are a must, than Hahlo’s your choice for the moment; if you need the ability to mark tweets as favorites, then it’s PocketTweets. Otherwise, it’s mainly which one you like the look of better. While neither may yet have reached the level of, say, Twitteriffic, they’re both promising apps.
I tend to Twitter via text message. But I have Twittered via the Twitter website itself on my iPhone. It seems to work fine...but there's nothing wrong with a new toy, huh?
~C