Twitter Refreshes Their Mobile Client

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Matthew Ellis

Matt is based in Manchester, UK and works for Tenonine Inc., a venture capital firm. He has a great passion for business, technology, intern (show all) Matt is based in Manchester, UK and works for Tenonine Inc., a venture capital firm. He has a great passion for business, technology, internet startups and the web and he is the Junior Editor for TheNextWeb UK. You can also find him on Twitter and Facebook.

A revamp of the Twitter Mobile site is long overdue, and finally announced today by @leland, the User Experience Lead of Twitter Mobile, is that long-awaited revamp.

Still in a stage of beta, the new site offers a much more innovative perspective of Twitter, probably thanks to it being built from scratch!

In essence, it boasts greater functionality and looks more like the standard web version with pretty much all the features.

To have a look at the new mobile site, head to mobile.twitter.com via your mobile device and tweet away! According to Twitter, the site works best in webkit browsers – used by devices that run Android, Symbian and PalmOS along with the iPhone. Reports say it should work for Blackberry devices but the team ‘haven’t done the fine-tuning yet’.

The new site features the new Retweet function but seems to be lacking with the Lists feature that was recently implemented, I hope that this is brought in somewhere in the near future.

The old site is still available through m.twitter.com but over time, the old URL will redirect to the new version as the beta becomes more stable and standardised on the various devices.

Apparently, this is only the start, in the blog post from Twitter, it says “we’re excited about the new APIs launching at Twitter, and have been busy tinkering with some neat ways to use them.”

I’m looking forward to how Twitter can develop the mobile site, and how far they are willing to go with the development of a native application for mobile devices.

There’s a few screenshots below which were taken while I was checking out the new site on my iPhone, what do you think of the UI and is it possible that Twitter can begin to compete with native mobile applications with this browser-based version?