My Week with Echofon

For the past week, I have been using Echofon to access Twitter. All in all the experience was good, and definitely not the worst of what was offered, however, there were some things that I wanted to be improved – or were lacking entirely from the application.

To continue the trend of the other three client reviews I have done over the last month, here is a list of the pros and cons of the client:

Pros:

• Looks pretty good, and offers a customisable font size.
• Great search function, including saved searches
• Good layout of the five columns
• An effective and useful implementation of the single column feature.
• The menu located in the upper left corner acts as the gateway to everything, and does this very well.
• Consistent layout and look throughout every column.
• Syncs with Echofon for iPhone. I don’t own an iPhone, but this is a good feature for those who do.
• The pop out profile viewer works almost perfectly, the best of all the clients.
• Automatically scrolls to the top of your feed when you refresh it, I like the behaviour.

Cons:

• No notification sounds
• Lacks a wide range of settings in both function and aesthetics.
• No button to click to send a tweet, you must press enter/return. Although this isn’t a huge deal one you get used to it – but for some people, this may not be ideal.
• Resets the window size every time you re-open the application
• Ad window is always present in free version; however there is not always an ad in there.

All in all, this is a very good client, especially considering that it only came out of beta a few weeks ago. It is most similar to DestroyTwitter, but it does offer some improved functionality. However, this functionality comes at the cost of not being as customizable and therefore, in my opinion, it doesn’t look as good.

I think that if you are looking for a well integrated experience with twitter.com then I would primarily recommend TweetDeck to you, but Echofon does come in a close second – offering a similar layout of columns and feeds.

In conclusion, I will say that Echofon is one of the better clients that I have tested; offering a user friendly experience but also allows advanced users of Twitter to make full use of things like saved searches and lists. If you are looking for a new, fresh Twitter experience – then I would recommend that you give Echofon a go.