Alan's Assessments?

Background

To start, I have tried most of the iPhone twitter applications. Of those, Tweetie won out, even though it was not free. It gave me most of what I wanted, it was stable (until of late), and it added features or fixed bugs on a regular basis. Now we have a new kid (Tweetdeck) on the mobile block. This one has been around on the desktop for a while, so I was curious to see what it would have to offer.

So in this review, I'm going to focus on what I use and what each has to offer. I'll also try to point out what each is missing or where it still has a few bugs.

Tweetie

As my daily mobile Twitter client, I have come to understand the ins and outs of this mobile client. With that, Tweetie is missing a few things I would like to see, like groups, but the developers have stated they will not have groups. Tweetie does have a nice interface, fairly easy method of following a conversation and Twitter trends views.

Pros

• Fairly Stable
• Link to Twitter trends
• Search
• Nearby setting (find your local tweeps)
• Saved Search
• Instapaper saves (saves a link to the Instapaper website)
• Numerous repost options (Repost tweet, repost link, post link to the tweet and mail the link)
• Supports multiple accounts
• Open link within Tweetie or Safari
• Include a pic and/or location within a tweet
• Save a tweet before sending

Cons

• No way to group users
• Refresh button tends to get hidden
• Costs $2.99 as of this post

Tweetdeck

Since Tweetdeck is new to the mobile arena, I was not expecting a lot from it. But if it did come to the show with the features it has installed in its desktop version, then Tweetie would have some competition. Now that I have had the Tweetdeck for iPhone for about 12 hours or so, I can tell you it is a great little twitter client. But with all things new, it does have a few areas of improvement. Many of the areas it needs to improve on are the basics of having an iPhone twitter app. But for now, I will use it, knowing full well, updates are on the way.

Pros

• Columns (groups) so that you can view only selected followings
• Free
• Sync to the desktop version using the new Tweetdeck profile
• Saved searches sync to desktop version
• Supports Multiple Accounts
• Nice notification system, details by column(group)
• Oh Yea, its still free
• Include a picture and/or location within a tweet

Cons

• Not stable yet, various crashes in different functions (browser, search, refresh and just sitting there. It crashed while I was typing this)
• No support for opening in the native Safari on the iPhone
• No link to Twitter trends
• Limited link handling (see tweetie pros above)
• Does not save a tweet to send later.

Summary

So to wrap this up, tweetie still wins this battle, but they better step it up. Because I have a feeling on the next update to tweetdeck, it will fix the minor issues and then it's game on. I will leave tweetdeck on the iPhone, especially for using the column view, which I think could end up being a deal breaker. I have added a couple of "Professional" reviews in the references, so until the next battle, I'll leave you with "May your tweets be plentiful and fulfilling, but not more than 140."

Developer Sites

Tweetie for iPhone - atebits (They also have a very nice mac desktop twitter client)

TweetDeck for iPhone - TweetDeck (They also have a desktop version built on Adobe Air)