Twinkini review

Benny Har-Even

We review Twinkini, a Twitter application for your Windows Mobile phone

Published on May 6, 2009

Twitter has become part and parcel of many people’s lives these days with some people seemingly sending out messages every moment of their waking lives. Having a Twitter client on a mobile phone then makes a lot of sense as it enables to keep your army of fascinated followers fully informed with your every movement throughout the day.

While iPhone owners have a wide range of Twitter apps to choose from there aren’t too many for Windows Mobile. Twinkini is one that seeing a fair bit of development right now, with new versions popping up all the time, and indeed the app was updated to version 0.9 on the day we wrote this.

That’s a good thing too as the first time we tried it, it didn’t seem to let us log in despite entering the correct details, a bug that seems to have been fixed. The software can usefully be downloaded and installed over the air to the phone, from the developer’s homepage and works on all Windows Mobile phones of both Pocket PC and Smartphone variety from version 5 onwards.

The look and feel once you’ve logged in is pretty much as you would expect – though it’s unclear why the launch icon is a fish in a bowl. Your follower’s tweets appear in a list - their thumbnail on the left and their tweet on the right, with their name just above that.

At the top right the time since the tweet was posted is shown. You can scroll up and down with your fingers from anywhere – the scroll bar at the right is too thin and redundant. Each new tweet arrives with a suitable tweet sound and you can choose to update the last 20 – 200 tweets automatically and the update interval from five minutes to every hour.

Only three lines are provided for the tweets so even with the smallest of the three font settings most tweets won’t fit and you’ll have to open each one to read the whole thing. From there though you can reply, using the soft key on the left, while from the menu option on the right you can mark tweets as a favourite, retweet automatically, send it by email, look at the user’s profile or send them a direct message.

You can quickly reply to tweets but selecting the left arrow key and retweet by hitting the right - most handy for those with actually keypads. You can also add GPS coordinates, which is good for bringing both stalkers and emergency services to your exact location.

Oddly though, while you can bring up a list of the @ replies you’ve received, there’s no way of displaying your direct messages, which is something of an omission.

A couple of the apps own features are being able to automatically tweet the song you’re listening to in Media Player on your phone. It works, but unfortunately, it sends out a message that declares to all that you're listening on a ‘Windows’ phone complete with corporate copyright logo. It’s enough to make you head straight out and pick up an iPhone.

All in all though, the app ticks almost all the bases and if you’re a Windows Mobile and Twitter user it’s worth installing. The developers just need to add the ability to view your direct messages to really finish the app off.