I don't know, you wait for a native Twitter client forever and then two come along at once. Last week, I looked at the Gravity client from Mobiways; this week it's the turn of Twittix from Mojo's Studio.

Both of these applications have the advantage of being programmed in Symbian C++, and that provides more speed and flexibility than Java, or a Web Runtime widget, but they both still use the same API programming calls to the Twitter server, which means there is a certain amount of similarity in how information is displayed in Twittix.

But I'm getting ahead of the review, so let's start from the design principles of Twittix. It's clear that at every step of the design process, Twittix has decided to follow the S60 style guide in terms of layout of dialogs, actions and reports from the application to the user. This should make users feel instantly at home with Twittix as it acts in a very similar way to all the other built in apps. With many options and displays available to a Twitter user coming to Twittix, this makes Twittix very easy to learn and use.

It also means that there have been certain compromises. For example, when you ask it to refresh (update) a timeline with new messages from online, it will do so with a great big “Downloading...” info box placed over the screen. That stops you having any interaction with the client beyond a “stop” button. Given the time that Twitter updates can take, especially when on a cellular connection, I would have liked to have seen the updates performed in the background.

Much like most third party Twitter clients, Twittix takes up the whole screen width to display a single column of tweets in an area on the standard 'tabbed' window style of S60, be it your timeline of friends, messages that mention yourself, messages sent to you, direct (private) messages and a list of all the people that you follow (and follow you) That last one is nice for the new twitter user but I have fun navigating over 2500 followers!

Using one of the smaller fonts, an average of 4 or 5 messages are displayed on screen at once, with d-pad up and down navigating through the list (and left and right moving to a different tab). Selecting a tweet brings up a menu allowing you to reply to the message, retweet it (something many people do, essentially you're saying “this is cool, you need to read it” to all your friends). Clear and simple for the new users to understand, although a certain familiarity with the Twitter way of doing things has been presumed.

If you have a touchscreen device, Twittix is going to suffer noticeably when compared to Gravity thanks to a lack of kinetic scrolling - this is where scrolling continues, slowing down over a second or so, after you have removed the stylus or finger from the screen. Again, Twittix follows the S60 paradigm here, keeping it familiar for users. Tapping on any message brings up the same S60 menu as you would get from pressing in the main d-pad button on any other phone.

This approach may raise the eyebrows of power users of S60, but I think it's the right call. We're not all power users, and Twittix is aimed just a shade below 'that' type of user. What is a welcome sight is a setting screen that allows you to set how often updates are checked for, and what sort of alert (a tone, a vibration, or nothing at all) is given for incoming tweets, something that is currently unique to Twittix among the S60 Twitter clients.

Posting a Twitter message is a simple matter of choosing 'Create Tweet' from the menu, and you're presented with an empty screen to type out your message, plus a handy counter of how many characters you have left in the top right corner (as you recall, Twitter lets you compose messages up to 140 characters). This is the same interface used for editing any replies or other messages and works well, although some of the S60 5th edition input methods will take up the whole screen and mask the 'characters remaining' counter.

Twittix's main strength lies in the simplicity of the interface, sticking strongly to the S60 style guide. That makes it more accessible, but does sacrifice some of the higher functionality and accessibility that is offered by other clients (notably Gravity). It's also lacking updates running in the background and, in this version, other functionality such as TwitPic (posting pictures via a third party site to your Twitter friends).

But this doesn't harm Twittix. It has enough functionality to put it far ahead of both the mobile web versions or Java clients, the layout is clear and easy to understand, and the learning curve is incredibly small. If you need a client that gives you a little bit more, then you can't go far wrong with Twittix. It's not got a huge feature list, but sometimes simplicity is what you need in an application for the fast moving Twitter service.

-- Ewan Spence