Twidroyd Pro for Android Review

RATING:
5 out of 5

PRICE:
$3.99 (Free Ad-Supported Version Available)

TASTY:
The ultimate Twitter client for the Android, with all the customization features, multiple account support, and reply/posting functions you’d expect from the gold standard.

BUMMER:
Uploading and sharing photos via the app is giving some users issues with the current version (Dec. 2010), though I didn’t have any problems with this feature. (Enable captions in Settings to work around the current photo issue.)

COOL:
Turn your phone to landscape mode to trigger an iPad-like view: A list of current tweets in your feed appears down the left side, taking up 20% of the screen. On the right side there’s plenty of room to display hyperlinks, photos, and any content attached to the tweets. Just select a tweet on the left, and the content appears on the right.

SIMILAR APPS IN THE MARKETPLACE:
TweetCaster Pro for Twitter
TweetDeck
Twitter
Tweeter Mobile
Twit Pro

The Android Marketplace is home to many Twitter clients. Every app makes it easy to read and respond to Tweets in your personal feed. Some even support multiple Twitter accounts, others make it easy to post a photo to your feed, auto-shorten posted links with bit.ly, and more.

Thankfully, one app stands head and shoulders above the pack: Twidroyd Pro. No other Twitter app packs this many features into one small package, including postings, mentions, direct messages with threaded view, integrated search, list viewing, link shortening, geo-location support, multi-language interface, background notifications and more.

What really makes this app shine is its landscape view mode. Simply turn your phone into landscape mode to trigger a LivePreview mode, which displays linked web pages and media right alongside the tweet. There’s no longer a need to open a browser and toggle between windows to fully engage in the content, see a photo, follow an embedded link, etc.

(Until I set eyes on Twidroyd, I was accustomed to this functionality on my iPad alone. Twitter, the official iPad app, has a built-in auto-preview when any tweet is selected.)

Twidroyd has native http://bit.ly support for URL (hyperlink) shortening, and fully integrates Twitlonger for tweets containing more than 140 characters. Plus, there’s plixi support for embedding photos within tweets, or hosting images through services like Twitpic to get photos to appear in your Tweet stream.

Be sure to review the Settings to tweak update intervals (a longer refresh time will help save some battery life), and turn on audible or vibration notifications for specific incoming communications from Twitter.

Finally, you can always shake your phone to trigger an automatic update. Shake it, Tweeters!

Read all of my past Android app reviews at Appolicious and Yahoo! Tech -- click here.