Photo Tweet App Review for the iPhone or iPod Touch

There are many many Twitter applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch and this is yet another one.  However Photo Tweet doesn’t control all your Twitter mobile needs but instead takes on the image idea and that’s all it does.  Is it enough for a total separate app?

Available for 59p (a lite version is available for free) all Photo Tweet is, is essentially a photo uploader for the twitgoo service.  And it works exceptionally well for what it touts and I’ve had no bugs or problems running it. The only little niggle is a constant “Optimizing” message coming up everytime I boot the application which takes some valuable seconds.  A great advantage is the ability for the app to automatically resend the photo if you lose connection at all and I have tested this and it works brilliantly.

However what the app is, is also it’s biggest downfall.  It’s just a photo uploader.  Most twitter applications for the iPhone have all of this built in and there is nothing new here. But focusing on just the images is a unique niche idea and only a handful of other apps are trying this and this is where I believe Photo Tweet should expand.  From my experience there are many twitter picture hosts (twitpic,twitgoo etc.) and I think an easy option to select between these would be necessary, as I don’t feel the urge to suddenly stop using twitpic and reallocating my pictures to a new service which Photo Tweet is forcing me to.  Obviously this won’t be as much of a problem if you’re already on Twitgoo but I think it immediately can turn off some users.

The ability to save a photo tweet and schedule it for upload later is apparently contained in the app according to the iTunes description but I can’t seem to find it myself.  This is great for people in a hurry or if you’re a Pay as you Go customer who has no data usage and must wait for a WiFi hotspot.  My apologies if this feature is there but I think a way to make it more user friendly would be to add a Save button next to the Send button when you’re writing a tweet.  This way you could easily decide whether you want to send the photo tweet immediately or to save for later on.

I think the biggest opportunity for Photo Tweet to distance itself from competitors would be to offer image customisation to the market.  Imagine the simple effects (B&W,Sepia,X-Ray) that are in the Mac application Photobooth and now apply them to Photo Tweet.  The option to rotate or crop photos as well as adding speech bubbles on the actual image would be great!  So far I haven’t seen other applications going down this route and these options could add some more fun to the photos you tweet.

So in a way Photo Tweet is a disappointment in it’s current abilities but then again it doesn’t claim to do everything and it does what it claims perfectly.  Hopefully the application developer will see about further enhancing Photo Tweet to distinguish it from the countless Twitter applications out there and make it a must-have app for Twitter addicts.