Home screen

Twitter has really taken off in the internet world today and the number of twitter clients on mobile platforms easily outnumber that of any other networking sites. Following up on my review of Tweets60 v1.22, I was looking for that perfect Twitter client that could not only let me tweet from my 5800 but also let me browse around twitter like from a pc/mac. Thats when I came across this amazing application called Gravity from the benches of mobileways.de, a Germany based company, who have an impressive line up of cool applications for devices based on the symbian platform. After reading the product description of Gravity, I knew I had to try this application, no matter the cost involved. After using Gravity for around 2 days now, I am totally bowled over by its amazing feature set discussed below.

Installation

Gravity is a paid application, costing USD 9.99 and can be bought from the official website of its developers here or from ovi store. There is even a free trial version available for download at the official website of mobileways.de but take my word, you are gonna like this application and hence don't waste time on the trial but straight away proceed to buying the application, using one of the links listed above. The installation file (.sisx) is around 350 kb and it took me less than 10 s to download this application from the ovi store client on my 5800.Features

Basic Tweet functions

The interface is one of the best features of this application. In addition to being optimized for finger touch browsing and easy to use, navigation around the client is as easy as a cakewalk. To tweet, tweeting, reply and follow, all the users have to do is tap on the tweet which will drop down a menu for performing the usual tweet tasks. The most commonly accessed features like "My Tweets", "Timeline", "Replies", "Followers", "Favorites", "Messages" are available in tabbed view and are just a finger tap away. Users can even set their own tabbed list using a keyword of their choice. Please check the screenshots in the gallery for tabbed list created using the keyword "phone".

Embedded links in the tweets can be opened by just clicking on the tweet and selecting the link from the drop down menu. A pop up will prompt the user to either open the link in the default symbian browser or copy the link to clipboard to browse later on an any third party browser (Now I can browse embedded links in Opera mini). If the tweets are embedded with links to images, there is an option for previewing the image too. This is another handy feature, giving you a glimpse of the embedded image before you decide to open it in the browser.

Loading pics and tweeting from Gravity

One feature I was looking forward to in a twitter client is the option of uploading and auto-tweeting an image from the phone gallery. Gravity brings this feature to my 5800 and boy, it does it in style. There is an images tab in the homescreen, clicking on which opens a screen letting you chose the image to upload and tweet. Users can even comment on the image being tweeted and just selecting update will upload and tweet the link. Simple and yet amazing! Gravity supports TwitPic, TwitGoo, MobyPicture and Posterous for image uploading using your twitter profiles. I used all the services to upload and tweet during the course of this review and found that Posterous was a bit slow on uploading. I am not sure whether this was a problem with Posterous or my wi-fi but in general, uploading and auto-tweet is pretty fast. Now, 5800 users have a few more options of directly uploading their images to the web (in addition to the Ovi, Flickr, Vox and Nokia  M-Blog services provided in the share online mode).

Tweet search is another highlight of this application which has been overlooked by other twitter clients. With the amount of information being exchanged in twitter everyday, tweet search is one of the most useful feature on twitter. Mobileways.de has done a great job by incorporating this in their twitter client. Now I can tweet from my 5800 and still be able to use all the twitter features.

I almost forgot to mention the best feature of this application: Gravity brings kinetic scrolling to s60 5th edition devices. Now everyone knows how useful this feature is to browse around especially in a long list of tweets. So far kinetic scrolling has been available only on Android and iPhone platforms, and was one of the most requested feature for s60 5th edition devices. I would love to see this feature for the symbian contact screen (Nokia are you listening? Kinetic scrolling has been successfully adapted on s60 5th edition). I hope developers at Nokia can incorporate this in the next firmware upgrade of 5800.

Pros

1. Well designed interface with easy navigation and fully optimized for finger touch browsing
2. Support for multiple twitter and Laconica (haven't heard of this service though) accounts
3. Customizable tab view with user defined filters
4. Twitter search and Twitter trends are very useful
5. Uploading pics and auto tweet is cool
6. Option of updating the client directly from the applcation itself
7. Kinetic Scrolling!

Cons

1. No theme support (esp when supported on s60 3rd adition devices)
2. Cannot Configure audio alerts for Timeline/Replies/DM’s & Searches (Atleast I was not able to figure out a way to do this but this is mentioned in the feature set though. May be its functional only on s60 3rd edition. Readers please leave a comment if you are able to configure this)
3. Not all the images are displayed in the images tab for uploading and auto-tweet (Latest 8 images from gallery are displayed)

Verdict

Gravity is the Best Twitter Client for symbian 5th edition devices today. The developers have incorporated every twitter feature that could possibly be performed from a mobile device in this application. I personally never thought kinetic scrolling could be implemented on the symbian platform with no third party application providing it, along with Nokia overlooking this technology in their OS. Special thanks to developers at Mobileways.de  for bringing this technology to the symbian world. Am glad that kinetic scrolling is available on symbian platform and its only a matter of time, till every major application incorporates this feature in their applications.  We would love to see Nokia lead by example by providing kinetic scrolling in their next firmware upgrade for 5800. This is one of the best paid applications I have reviewed so far and if you are twitter user, you gotta have Gravity on your 5800.

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