Why I don’t use native twitter client but Opera Mini

December 11, 2011 · 6 comments

I’m not a power user of Twitter. I don’t tweet much and according to Tweetdeck, I have an average of 1.75 tweets/day. But still, I read a lot from the people I follow in Twitter.

Based of my usage pattern, I find it much much effective not to use any native twitter clients. Instead, Opera Mini + Twitter Mobile site serves as a killer twitter client for my android mobile.

Here’s why:

Unicode font support

First and foremost, I can enable the Regional font support in my Opera mini browser and can read the tweets that are not written in English. This is a BIG plus and one of the main reason I don’t want to switch to a native client (Until there’s a built in support for Unicode fonts in android).

Always lists the latest tweets first

Whenever I open the twitter’s mobile site, it lists the latest tweets on top. During day time, I check the tweets may be say every 2 hours and the site always lists the tweets that are fresh. If and only if I’m interested in what my friends said in the past, I could scroll down and see their tweets.

But this is not the case with native twitter apps which lists the tweets from where you left it in your last session. I had to manually scroll to the top while unnecessarily downloading all the tweets from the web, thus increasing my data usage.

I searched for any settings to show the latest tweets first, but couldn’t find it in official Twitter client. Not sure about other apps, though.

The UI nightmare

I have a small screen Android mobile (Samsung). So, when I try to tweet something from the Twitter app, the split up of the UI space taken up different elements of the screen is (ha! you think it is easy to take screenshot in Android!?) :

The Android keyboard – 60%
Tweet and Cancel button bar – 10%
User image and user name panel – 10% (seriously, why do I need this!? Don’t I know I’m the one who’s tweeting!?)
The tweet textbox – 10%
Photo and location icons panel – 10%

Thus leaving only 10% of UI space to the text I’m typing and making it hard to read. Even worse, it always shows the first line of the tweet and never scrolls to show the second line.

Never the case with the mobile site where the tweet textbox gets 40% of UI space.

And, that’s the reason why I don’t care about any new Twitter interface changes and still love the simple and effective Twitter mobile site.

What do you think?