I have to say that I’m really disappointed in the state of Twitter clients for the iPad. I have quite a few; Twittelator for iPad, Twitterrific for Twitter, Osfoora HD, HootSuite, and TweetDeck. Yet, last night when I needed to do a specific task, I wound up using Twitter (previously known as Tweetie 2) for the iPhone/iPod touch on my iPad.
I saw a tweet from Kevin Rose asking a question and wanted to see the responses he got. It was just about an hour after he had asked the question. I was on my iPhone at the time and used Twitter to do a search for @kevinrose. I found quite a few responses, but wanted the iPhone free to act on the advice given.
I picked up my iPad and started with Twittelator for iPad. The search worked as expected for the first group of tweets found. However, when I got to the bottom of the search timeline which ended only 16 minutes prior to my search, the next set of tweets loaded were from 16 hours prior to Kevin’s question. What happened to the 45 minutes in-between as well as other tweets?
Disgusted, I switched to Twitteriffic for Twitter (really, that’s the best name they could come up with?) and did the same procedure only to get pretty much the same results.
To be fair, I didn’t try HootSuite or TweetDeck and I wasn’t about to reload Osfoora with all the bugs that client has, so I loaded Twitter (Tweetie 2) for the iPhone/iPod touch and got all the results I wanted without any gaps in the timeline.
I really don’t understand why the two most popular Twitter clients for the iPad have such blatant bugs in them, or if they are not bugs, why Twitter (Tweetie 2) was able to get all the tweets I was looking for correctly.
All I can say is, I sure hope that Twitter is working on the iPad version of Twitter (Tweetie 2). I would buy that app in a millisecond pretty much no matter what the price, although, I suspect that it will be free or Universal when they do manage to get the iPad version finished.
