Twitter Embraces Windows Phone 7
After creating an Android app and buying out Tweetie (renamed Twitter for iPhone), Twitter has launched an official app for Windows Phone 7 fans.
As with our other mobile clients, Twitter for Windows Phone includes all of the features that you’d expect from Twitter – your timeline, suggested users, messages, lists, and a great way to explore Twitter without even logging in. You can sign up for an account right from the app as well. The app is really fast, and we think you’ll enjoy the experience.
The platform’s design and user interface, which is called Metro, is especially great for Twitter users because it’s simple and easy to use. It also provides a different way to look at information on a phone’s screen through Pivots, which are sort of like pages of the app. Pivots allow you to swipe left or right to view different categories or types of information within a single application. For example, in Twitter for Windows Phone, you can swipe left or right to move from your timeline to mentions to direct messages. (Official Twitter Blog)
Taking a cue from Tumblr, the folks at Twitter decided to partner with a third party company (by the name of Identity Mine) in order to ensure that the app was not only functional, but complimented the device (as shown in the video below).
Compared to its brethren, Twitter for Windows Phone 7 comes across as rather basic as there apparently is no indication on whether the app supports third party media tools for image and video uploading (note: if you have a Windows Phone 7, feel free to enlighten us in the comment section below).
While closer in appearance to Android than iOS, the Windows Phone 7 app seems to rely heavily upon Microsoft’s Pivot, which gives the app a more natural feel instead of one that was just simply imported from another device.
With official apps upon Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7 (note: Twitter for Blackberry is not an official app), Twitter is one of the few companies with an app upon every major mobile device save one (that would be webOS for Palm Pre).
Darnell Clayton is a geek who discovered blogging long before he heard of the word "blog" (he called them "web journals" then). When he is not tweeting, friendfeeding, or blogging about space, he enjoys running, reading and describing himself in third person.