Twidroid review

Damien McFerran

We review Twidroid, a way of accessing your Twitter account from your Android device

Published on Jun 4, 2009

If you’ve never heard of Twitter before then we can only hope that the rock you’ve been sleeping under for the past year or so hasn’t been too comfortable.

This social networking phenomenon – which has ensnared the likes of Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and countless others (both famous and not-so famous) – shows no sign of abating; clearly the notion of posting up 140-character snippets about your daily life has lasting appeal.

One of the key reasons that Twitter has succeeded is because the concept integrates so seamlessly with current mobile phone technology; there are plenty of Twitter clients out there and Twidroid is one of several on the Android platform. But is it the best?

Naturally, the first thing you’ll be prompted for when booting up the application for the first time is your Twitter ID and password. Once you’ve done this, the 50 most recent ‘Tweets’ from your watched contacts will fill the screen (you can set up Twidroid to display more or less Tweets, but 50 is a manageable amount to begin with).

Using this application it’s possible to do pretty much everything you can do using Twitter online; you can contact your friends, post new Tweets, reply to existing Tweets, follow (or unfollow) users and even block those annoying individuals you’d rather not have listening in on your every thought and action.

It’s also possible to upload photos, and Twidroid supports Phodroid, Twitpic and Twitgoo image hosting services. Naturally, once you upload an image it is instantly ‘Tweeted’ on your account and to add an image you don’t even need to have Twidroid open – you simply select the Twidroid option from the ‘Share’ menu when browsing your photos via the Android operating system.

The level of customisation is impressive, too. You can tell Twidroid to check for new Tweets every few minutes, every hour or even just once a day – and that’s merely three of the available choices. You can also get the program to alert you whenever you receive a direct message or a reply, either using a sound notification (which, given the adaptability of the Android platform, you can naturally select yourself) or a more subtle blink of the LED at the top of the phone.

Twidroid certainly ticks all of the boxes as far as functionality is concerned but it’s clearly still evolving and isn’t quite perfect yet. We’ve experienced a few issues with the program failing to connect properly or even crashing out during use. These operating bugs are gradually being squashed with each update but they can be annoying at times, especially when you consider how problem-free the web-based version of Twitter is.

Although there’s plenty of scope for improvement Twidroid is about as comprehensive a Twitter client as you could possibly hope for; hopefully the developers can smooth out the cracks over the coming months to make this a truly essential application for your mobile.