TweetDeck, one of the big cross-platform desktop Twitter clients has released an iPhone version. Not only does TweetDeck for iPhone bring a uniform feel and fit from desktop to iPhone but it allows you to sync between the two using TweetDeck user accounts. With this respect anything that you change on one or the other gets pushed out across all your TweetDeck clients. This is something that isn’t possible with separate clients and means that tweets that you’ve read in one place aren’t marked as so in the other.
TweetDeck brings the standard features of TweetDeck including multiple user accounts, multiple columns including the ability to set a search term or group as a column, URL shortening and both TwitPic and YFrog integration. You can even shake to refresh and follow/unfollow people right from the app.
There isn’t much here that differentiates TweetDeck for iPhone from other Twitter apps on the iPhone apart from syncing with TweetDeck on your desktop. The visuals are pretty slick it has to be said and remind me a lot of the card UI implemented on the Palm Pre where you can swipe between columns. The app is however free and doesn’t leverage ads to support it as yet and so it has that in it’s corner but with iPhone 3.0 released today and push notification available immediately we may see some push notification from existing iPhone Twitter clients (here’s looking at you Twitterfon!) that might just make TweetDeck for iPhone a little behind the curve. Still there’s no reason that of course TweetDeck couldn’t pull Push out the bag, but I would have thought since it launched last night/today that if they were going to do it, it would already have it built in.
So is TweetDeck for iPhone a game changer? Not yet. If you use TweetDeck for your desktop which I do, then I must admit having all my desktop clients and my iPhone in sync does make it a tad more convenient but I wasn’t that bothered that they weren’t in sync before this arrived. Will this replace Twitterfon Pro on my iPhone? Perhaps, it’s definitely a nice UI, but I’ll have to wait and see if sync really makes that much difference to me and what iPhone 3.0 holds for us on the Twitter side.
Hit the read link for a gallery of screenshots of TweetDeck in action. (more…)
