Part 1: Best Tweeting Experience for Nokia E71: Gravity

Packing my E71 for a series of tests of various applications for the E71. This time I’m taking a look at the best applications for twittering with focus on what works on E71, which in turn will work on most other S60-based handsets as well. Each Part will hold a rather in-depth test of each application hence why I’m just putting a single test in each post.

Intro

Brief on Twitter according to Wikipedia:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers).”

So far so good. Same as with many other internet related services also Twitter works really well on Symbian S60 in general and especially well on Nokia E71. To create a bit of an overview I’ve grouped the choices into three categories: Paid for installed clients, Free installed clients, Browser-based clients (all free).

Paid, installed clients: Gravity

Gravity is the leader of the moment (see image), providing:

• Timeline
• Replies
• Direct Messages
• My Tweets
• Favourite tweets
• Friends (people you follow)
• Followers
• Browsing of User Tweets, User & Replies, Search
• Nearly endless Twitter searches
• Twitter top trends
• Picture tweeting with Twitpic and Mobypicture
• Full-screen mode
• – and those are just the Twitter specific features.

For the rest Gravity holds settings for the profile, timeline updates, replies updates, messages updates, and auto-update settings. In case you loose your phone your account and password seems secure as the password is represented by asterisks. In-application update feature makes sure you have the most recent version at all times – if you want to. You can add several additional Twitter and Laconica accounts.

Finally and probably most impressive of all the graphical design and touch and feel of Gravity is unparalelled on the S60 platform and rivals the best of other platforms. Oh, and in case you were wondering I actually coughed up the 10-or-so Euro for the application. It rules supreme and has set the bar for what Twitter applications should be able to do on the E71 and S60.

It comes with a full-blown trial to test the whole thing for what I remember to be 10 days, which should be more than enough to get a good idea of what you’d be paying for – just the way I like it.

Gravity can be picked up through the vendor’s website at http://mobileways.de. The author is to be found on Twitter (of course)

Have a look at the feature by feature overview on this Google Doc.