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Continuing our irregular series of user reviews, forum regular David Gilson tests the Symbian app Gravity. If you have a review of a product you would like to appear on Crave and you’re prepared to put the same care and attention into it that David has, email it to [email protected] and we’ll publish the best.
The beauty of Twitter is the ecosystem of applications and cloud services built up around it, especially mobile apps that let you tweet on the move. Symbian accounts for half of all smart phones, so I checked out several different Symbian Twitter apps and was most impressed with Gravity. What’s so good about it?
I’ve been reviewing a test build of Gravity, version 1.30, which should be available to buy very soon. If you can’t wait until then, upgrading from the current version, 1.21, will be free.
The first thing that strikes you with Gravity is how it breaks from the standard S60 user interface. Instead, it opts for simple glass-like bars that give you information and act as links to different parts of the application. There are always extra functions you can bring up via the softkey options menu, but the user interface is so well put together, you rarely need to.
The first screen you’ll see allows you to set up your account and choose your Internet connection. Once you’ve done that, you can view news updates about the application, go to your Twitter timeline, check the latest trending topics, and more.
On your summary page (pictured right), you’ll see a set of bars for each of the various tweet categories, such as the main timeline, @replies and direct messages. These links show how many unread tweets they each have. Gravity also supports lists, one of Twitter’s newest features.
When you’re viewing the main timeline (pictured below), tweets are shown in the same glass-like bar style, and are colour coded for basic tweets, and incoming or outgoing @replies. Posting a tweet is easy — you just start typing, there’s no need to go through a menu.
The killer feature in Gravity’s user interface is a sideways scrolling bar of options that appears when you select any tweet. This enables you to do all of the basics as well as things like forwarding the tweet via text or email, and opening links. If the tweet has a link to a photo, Gravity can load a preview of the photo without needing to launch your Web browser.
When you click a link you’re given the option of not only viewing in a Web browser, but also copying the URL to your clipboard, or sending it to your Delicious account. On top of all this, Gravity can also compile a conversation timeline of tweets between users who have been @replying back and forth.
If you’re a control freak, you can really mine down into Gravity and set it up exactly as you want it. If you like auto-checking — and why wouldn’t you? — you can individually set how often your timeline, replies and so on are checked. You can also set different audio alerts for different types of tweets, and whether or not Gravity should follow the settings of whatever alert profile you’ve set your phone to.
Gravity is also the only S60 Twitter application that allows you write draft tweets and schedule them to be posted later on. In addition to all of these features, if you’re responsible for a second Twitter account (for your company or blog, for example), you can set up multiple accounts in Gravity and switch between them with ease.
I can’t recommend Gravity highly enough. If you’re interested, you can download a 10-day free trial from the Ovi Store and purchase it for £6.26 from MobileWays.de.
