Ever since last Fall, I’ve been a Windows Phone user. I’m a happy Windows Phone user, for the most part. There are a few holes to fill, including a few key apps (NPR, PayPal, LinkedIn, to nam

Rowi Twitter app
e a few) and one glaring hole, at least for me: the lack of a rock star Twitter application.
I’ve used just about every mobile platform and have trialed Twitter apps on all of them. Windows Phone, up until now, has no showstopper Twitter app. Whereas Symbian has Gravity (an all time favorite of mine) and iOS folks have TweetBot, Windows Phone has no real champion, yet.
For my personal tweeting, I’ve gotten by with an application called Rowi, which, for the most part, is a decent app. I like Rowi’s app and the way the UI flows.
Rowi also won me over early on because of its use of live tiles and it’s instant notification of DMs and Twitter replies via push notifications.
In fact, I did a roundup of Twitter apps on Nokia Conversations last month, mentioning Rowi amongst some other competitors.
A new bird is born
However, this weekend, Carbon, the ever-popular Twitter client for WebOS finally made its debut after the developer had to go round and round trying trying to get the app into the Marketplace.
So, now that Carbon is out, how does it stack up? For starters, lets run down the feature list:
- Full inline Pictures on the Timeline(needs to be enabled from settings)
- Double Tap on tweets for quickly replying to tweets without the need to leave timelines
- Quickline: A swiss army timeline for accessing all kinds of timelines from Lists, Retweets, Saved Searches.
- Live Ties for every account, pinnable to the Home Screen with Mentions & Direct Messages background checks
- Compose Tile, pinning a compose tile on the Home Screen for a speedy tweet composition
- Search Tiles, pin a #hashtag or keywords to your home screen for quick access to a search timeline
- Threaded Direct Messages View
- And of course, Bit.ly Pro URL shortening, Read Later support(Instapaper & Read It Later) and a lot more…
Using Carbon – it’s really good!
First off, I love the amount of information Carbon shows for each tweet in the timeline. I started out by choosing small in the Tweet Size option, to maximize the amount of tweets I can see when scrolling through my timeline. As you can see from the screenshot, this preference wisely uses screen real estate.
Also, one thing I like is the presentation of threaded direct messages. This makes a nice SMS-style view for these private communications that happen between you and your Twitter-peeps.
Usability and user experience: Carbon is a joy to use. The application scrolls through long lists of tweets with speed without any lag, which is a huge pain point of mine with Rowi (which the Rowi developers have told me will go away with an impending future release).
You will find that your tweets, mentions and direct messages load quickly, even over a cellular connection. Again, this was a pain point with other Twitter apps on Windows Phone including Rowi and Mehdoh.
Should you buy Carbon?
Carbon isn’t a free app, in fact it’s in the Marketplace for $1.99 US. So..is it worth it?
You can rest assured that this will be the best 2 bucks you’ll spend in the Marketplace for a Windows Phone Twitter client. This app is fast, uses live tiles to make it useful, supports multiple accounts and actually makes Twitter useful on your Windows Phone.
Go buy it, like now. Haven’t done it yet? Go!!
Oh yes, don’t you worry, we’ll be back shortly. 😉 The competition will be back on!
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It was a quiet close competition but people will truly fill the choices for themselves. The competition was remarkable and I knew that this will produce further advantages to all subscribers online.
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