Twitter for iPad review

Not two minutes after we brought you a splendid review of the leading iPad Twitter app, Twittelator, does Twitter itself decide to release an official app – and for free as well!

Twitter went back to Tweetie (latterly Twitter for iPhone) app designers for the latest official Twitter application. And what they've come up with is something pretty special indeed.

The first time you open the app you’ll be underwhelmed, that is until you start poking around. The UI suddenly becomes alive with functionality and makes use of the screen's real estate in a way that no app we've seen to date has yet to manage.

The first thing you will see is your main Twitter feed in a central panel, on the left is a panel of options for each of your profiles – timeline (your feed), mentions, lists, messages, profile and search.

Tap a tweet and it will automatically launch a window to display the content within the tweet. So if it's a link it'll launch a browser panel, if it's a hashtag it'll show you all the other posts featuring the tag, if it's a @whoever then it shows you the conversation, etc, etc.

You can move deeper and deeper into a pile of tweets, sweeping back and forth through panels in an incredibly intuitive way.

The beauty of this app is how in almost every way it beats every other Twitter app for the iPad. It's generally faster and intuitive in a way that no other app has really shown so far.

Twittelator's search is more developed and it has more option "in tweet" which might make it more useful to a heavy tweeter. Tweetdeck is more customisable for multiple accounts. But for most users Twitter for iPad ticks all the boxes.

It’s got all the bells and whistles you’d expect: You can customise your service for photo and video and there is a great read-later option using Instapaper or read more. You can even pinch and expand individual tweets as a quick way to get to their profiles.

Twitter for iPad is the first iPad to really show the potential of the device. In terms of UI design it's miles ahead of anything we've seen so far.

And for this reason, it is an absolute must.