Twitter updated its mobile apps for Android, iPad and iPhone today and we went hands-on with the iPhone version. Dubbed version 4.0, the Twitter mobile update is buzzing online (of course on twitter it self). So what does the new Twitter app for the iPhone bring in? The apps is all new and as Twitter themself claim, it is fast. We won’t dispute the fact that the new Twitter app is sleek and fast. However is the same fast enough for actually using it and doing a lot of work? May be not.
As someone in our twitter timeline pointed, the update wont please powerusers. The ones who do a whole lot of tweeting from their mobile apps might just feel that thigns have slowed down, a lot more taps required and the most angry of all would be the ones who trade in a lot of DMs. The above image would show that you need to click a tweet, let it open in a new window and then perform tasks like replying, retweet, fav etc.
The standard Home, Mentions and DM tab have been altered by Twitter leading to this criticism. The default tab remains home, but the very next tab now is connect which lets you chose between Interactions and Mentions. We believe this is a good add-on. Now you can view your retweets, favourites and replies together or toggle to just mentions mode to see only replies. Gives more info on the same screen without cluttering. Favourites or follow notification is something echofon (for Mac) has merged in the home timeline itself and we are surprised Twitter did its own connect tab for it, we would like to use it for a few more days before giving a verdict on which is better.
The DM tab is replaced by Discover in the bottom. This gives you a search option, promoted stories, trending etc. The final tab ‘me’ has your profile view and another tap inside that gives you your DM’s. This can be frustrating if you want to reach your DM’s quickly. We are sure Twitter would face a lot of criticism for this.
Over all the app is clean, the compose tweet page is more or less standard and we believe that apps like Tweetbot would remain happily in business even after this update from Twitter to 4.0 🙂