If you aren’t really down for reading this entire posting, let me just sum it up for you: TwitterFon is the best free Twitter app on the App Store at the moment.
Continuing with my series of reviews for Apps here at johnthrasher.net, I decided I would write about TwitterFon. Though I had been using Twitter sporadically since April 2008, I didn’t start becoming consistently interested in Twitter until the App Store was introduced last July. In fact, I think Apple and the iPhone are the reasons that Twitter has become such a gigantic hit. People were going App-crazy and wanted any App they could find. When they found Twitterific, and Twinkle they went nuts at the idea of updating every step they took from their iPhone. One person told another person to join, and so on and so on – and boom! You’ve got a new social networking hit.
When the App Store was opened there weren’t nearly as many Twitter apps as there are now. I immediately downloaded Twitterific and Twinkle, only becuase I knew a few people on Twitter and thought it would be a neat way to see what people were up to – and because they were free. After eventually realizing that Twinkle had a more dynamic design and less ads (if any) I was using it 99% of the time. In fact, I would only use Twitterific to upload pics to Twitpic because at the time Twinkle wasn’t capable. I had used Twinkle all the way up until January of this year, when I saw Guy Kawasaki twittering from TwitterFon. I had never heard of it and thought I would check it out.
Sure enough, this was the best decision I could have made. TwitterFon, is far and beyond better than any other free Twitter app out there right now.
So what is so great about TwitterFon? Tons of things. First and foremost is the sleek, easy design. Though I think that the design could be improved to have a bit more contrast and make it look less cartoony, the design is simple and not confusing. Anyone could start using this app and feel comfortable within 10 minutes. The app reminds me a lot of the latest Facebook app. It bundles tons of features in to a very easy to use design and user interface. Considering this platform is less than a year old, the developers are doing a very good job at what they do. 
There are a couple significant features that make TwitterFon stand out compared to its free competitors. First, the ability to delete tweets! Who knew this would be such a stand out feature, but it really is. We all know that sometimes the iPhone’s predictive texting can be extremely off center and annoying. There’s nothing worse than realizing you just tweeted “Stuck in tragic” rather than “Stuck in traffic.” TwitterFon gives you the option of deleting tweets. And, unless it’s buried somewhere deep in Twitterific or Twinkle, I don’t think either support this feature. Another great thing about TwitterFon is the easiness in retweeting tweets. I don’t know why other apps haven’t caught on to this, but retweeting (RT’ing) someone’s tweet is impossible (until cut and paste comes along in 3.0) in other Twitter apps unless you memorize their tweet word for word. Who wants to do that? With TwitterFon, you click the cell of the tweet you want to RT and a button is presented to “Retweet.” It then creates a tweet for you and you click publish and it’s done. How easy is that!?
I know a lot of people are huge fans of Tweetie for the iPhone, but I have never used it. And, it’s $2.99 and I am cheap. However, when I ask people why they love Tweetie so much they basically tell me that it shows current trends, and has location settings of everyone in the area. TwitterFon supports both trends as well as search and location based searching. The only difference is: it’s free.
I can honestly say that my only qualm with TwitterFon is a bug that I am assuming will soon be fixed. After their last update in April, every time I launch the app, I start scrolling and it freezes for about 5-8 seconds before resuming its normal function. This is extremely annoying. It completely offsets the user experience from the launch of the app. At least freeze after a minute of so of using it. That would be less frustrating!
Once the developers fix that tiny little bug, I honestly don’t know of anything else that could be improved with the app. It has everything you will ever need in a successful, powerful twittering experience.
App: TwitterFon
Released: July 28, 2008
Stars: 9/10
Free
Click here to download TwitterFon
