Two Android App Reviews

Touiteur

I was on the hunt for a new Twitter client when the official one stopped serving me notifications. (To that end, I am a little unhappy at the news that the official Twitter app will be baked into Android 2.2, presumably with no way to uninstall it, just like you can't uninstall the Facebook app). I installed Touiteur because the name amused me, but I ended up liking it enough to pay for the pro version.

What I like: You can set a person's tweets to show up against whatever color background you want, making it easy to breeze through the timeline at high speed without missing tweets by the people you actually know in real life. Composing tweets is done via an editor that pulls down from a bar at the top of the screen, so you can write a tweet no matter where you are in the app. The interface in general is highly polished and a joy to look at.

What I don't like: Today I had to reinstall Touiteur because it decided that I wanted to see 20 copies of the most recent tweet in the timeline. This may have something to do with the fact that an update was just pushed out today? Touiteur also has to be set to use the supported APIs for retweeting instead of the old method; by default it will just copy a tweet and stick "RT" in front of it. You can't tap directly on links in Touiteur, either. You tap on the entire tweet, then tap Links from the pop-down menu, then the link you wanted. I guess this problem could be solved by making the text a little bigger, which I wouldn't mind, but it doesn't seem to give me the option.

So it's a little rough around the edges, but really the worst thing I can say about it is it takes me, on average, three tries to spell the name right.

Handcent SMS

People kept telling me I should install Handcent, so I did. And then I uninstalled it 20 minutes later.

What I like: Uh... it did not crash once in the short time I used it?

What I don't like: It doesn't really offer anything over the built-in SMS client except for the ugly Mac-inspired "speech bubble" layout. In fact, the whole thing looks like an iPhone app, which wouldn't be so bad except it completely breaks Android UI conventions.

So it's an ugly, ugly app, but worst of all it has no reason to exist. This review's a little short because, like I said, I only used Handcent for about 20 minutes.

I'll probably do more of these. Look for reviews of Swype and Dolphin Browser HD soon-ish (no promises).