There are many Twitter clients to be found on the Android marketplace. One of my favourite one is called Swift. Some Twitter apps out there may have a better looking UI, but none of them is as fast as Swift. Let’s take a quick look at the Swift UI, starting with the timeline view.

This is the view you’ll see after you have set up the Twitter account. On the top you have your own profile image, and the menu to access other tabs like @replies and direct messages. The white button on the top right edge is used to write a new tweet. I like the used font style and font size as the timeline is very readable. And this is also were you’ll realize the first big pro of Swift: updating the timeline is fast as hell. Scrolling through the tweets is also very fluid without any hiccups. I have tried out many other Twitter clients (currently Seesmic), but none of them can compete with the speed Swift provides. By touching the icons at the top you can open the main menu.

As you can see on the screenshot above, the main menu gives access to further tabs like @mentions, direct messages, search and profiles. Touching one of those icons will open the appropriate view. There is also the possibility to use the hardware “menu” button on your Android phone to access the tabs, as well as further options.

The next screenshot shows the @replies view.

Every time there is a new reply, new tweets on the friends timeline, or a direct message the appropriate icon will be highlighted yellow. Touching a tweet will bring up the detail view.

All usual options like “retweet” and “reply” are available. One of the nice features Swift has is the way that tags, profiles and links are extracted from the tweet and shown seperatly at the bottom of the detail view. This way it’s much easier to open links or search for tags directly. Pressing the hardware menu button will provide further options like “save for later”, “copy tweet text” and “copy link to tweet”.

Adding a new tweet is done within a small pop-up window. After you have written your message, you can either send the tweet or access a submenu for further options by pressing the icon with the arrow at the left.

Further options for each tweet include picture attachement, take photo, attach video and shorten URLs.

Another nice feature is the hashtag search, which you can use to scan Twitter based on your searchphrase. On this view Swift will also show the current hot topics.

Swift provides many settings like defining the number of tweets to download, choosing the services used for image/ video upload, as well as a selection of URL shortening services. Further settings include notification options, and the possibility to open links within the Swift app.

I used Swift as my main Twitter client for quite some time, and only recently switched to Seesmic as i wanted to try out a new approach. Swift is definetly one of the best Twitter clients on Android, and anybody who will choose speed over style should definetly give Swift a try. It just works extremely well, is fast and responsive. You get a load of different setup options, like URL shortening, images and video upload and more. Yesterday Hootsuite announced that they have acquired the developer behind Swift, so this actually means that Swift development will be discontinued. Swift will still be available on the market, but there will be no new features. It’s still worth a try though, since i have already played around with the Hootsuite app for Android and quite like it because it has a great UI, but it doesn’t seem as speedy as swift. A review of Hootsuite will follow in the coming days.

[xrr rating=4.0/5]