I Tweet! review

Damien McFerran

We review I Tweet!, one of the best Twitter clients you can get for your Android phone without splashing out any cash

Published on Oct 28, 2009

The number of Twitter clients currently available for the Android platform is staggering, but the general quality of these apps is less than fantastic. Until now we’ve always sided with the superlative Twidroid, but Multiple Facet’s I Tweet! does a pretty good job of making us reconsider this stance.

Formerly a paid-for app, I Tweet! is now being offered free of charge and it offers the excellent level of functionality that you would expect for a premium piece of software.

For example, you can configure multiple Twitter accounts and toggle between them from the app’s home screen. I Tweet! also displays your timeline by date, so Tweets are broken up into daily blocks, which makes them easier to digest.

Elsewhere, the range of options is pretty much on par with the best Twitter clients out there. It’s possible to change the colour scheme of the app, enlarge or reduce the font size and toggle which name is displayed when people post a Tweet (from either their full name or their Twitter nickname).

In addition to this, you can get I Tweet! to check your account for new posts periodically. I Tweet! will then alert you when new Tweets are posted, or when you receive a mention or a direct message. You can even go as far as to pick what colour you’d like your phone’s LED to flash (assuming it has one, naturally). The only issue here is that this automatic checking drains your battery life, so you’ll only want it to do so every hour or so, at most.

To top it all off, you can pick which photo uploading service you’d prefer to use and which URL-shortening portal you favour. To be honest, I Tweet! is as robust as you could possibly wish for in terms of options.

Making your way around the app’s menu screens is relatively easy, with nice bold buttons and intuitive options. Compared to Twidroid’s glorious menu design, I Tweet! does end up looking a little rough around the edges, but it’s certainly not ugly.

Aside from the fact that it lacks Twidroid’s brilliant Notification Bar option, I Tweet!’s other problems are relatively minor. We found that sometimes it doesn’t store enough Tweets, so if you’ve not checked your timeline in a while, you might find that you can’t view everything posted by your fellow Twitters.

The other issue is how much processing power I Tweet! consumes; because you have to have it running in the background in order for the automatic checking to function, it has a habit of slowing down your phone. Twidroid does this too, but seemingly to a much lesser extent.

Still, if you for some reason don’t find Twidroid to your tastes, then this is a perfectly acceptable alternative and certainly beats most other Android Twitter clients out there.